Go on long walks with your beloved
Going on walks together was an integral part of the Victorian courtship ritual. Beginning with a short stroll an interested couple might take together either during or at the end of a dance, they would soon grow into strolls through parks or in the countryside. And though taking walks was the most conventional way of getting to know each other, it wasn’t the only one. Couples might also go ice-skating (which brought the hot prospect of an arm round the waist for stability) or play painfully soppy piano duets (made all the more steamy by the couples pushed up against each other while sharing a small piano stool).
Having said that, by Victorian standards going on a country walk could be quite racy: for it raised the slim prospect that the couple might hold hands. In fact, both the written and unwritten rules of Victorian etiquette unanimously agreed that if a man and woman happened to be walking on an unevenly surfaced road he could take her hand. As the only permissible form of contact between a couple who were not yet engaged, the presumed rationale is that it protected her from the indignity of having to be picked up from the mud.
What a man absolutely could not do during one of these walks was turn away from his beloved to look at anybody else. Whether on a walk, at church, or in the street, it was prescribed in practically every Victorian self-help dating manual that his attention was to belong entirely to his beloved. Having said that, considering that during one of their walks he might be accompanied by her mother, grandmother, cousins, aunts etc., one can only imagine he would have been far too frightened to. Nor could he let her walk on the edge of the pavement: like the gallant, chivalric knight of old, the potential for splashing his leg with roadside puddles of mud or water was his burden to bear.