Matters of the Heart Precede Love and Marriage in Florida

Angela Horan and Gary Bergstrom met online more than six years ago. Both have overcome serious health issues — she a heart transplant, he a motorcycle accident.

In a pandemic landscape where big weddings still don’t make sense to many, the wedding that Angela Horan and Gary Bergstrom put on March 20 at their seven-acre property in Myakka, Fla., did to them, somehow. Though at the time, Floridians were being encouraged not to gather in groups of more than 10, Ms. Horan and Mr. Bergstrom said they knew most of their 300 guests had been vaccinated or had Covid antibodies. And given the magnitude of the hurdles they had scaled as a couple, they decided an extra-large celebration was worth the risk. Ms. Horan, 42, and Mr. Bergstrom, 53, met on the dating app Plenty of Fish in February 2015, just after Ms. Horan learned she had cardiomyopathy, a life-threatening heart condition. In December 2014, she was told she would need a heart transplant and, in the meantime, was implanted surgically with a device to keep her heart pumping. Her choice to join a dating site in fragile health was odd timing, she knows. “But at that point, things were getting worse and worse in my life,” she said.