Dr. Stanley Forwand spent six consecutive years searching online for the perfect woman. During that time, he doled out thousands of dollars on airline tickets and drove his Toyota Prius more than 70,000 miles to the homes of women he had met on dating apps, hoping to find “a steady and sane, loving partner for life.”
“I went on a gazillion dates, all over Florida and to places like Philadelphia, Detroit, Charlotte — name a city and I probably went there on a date — and paid for dinner to boot,” said Dr. Forwand, a semiretired cardiologist who lives in Nokomis, Fla., about 70 miles south of Tampa.
“I nearly exhausted myself,” he said.
Dr. Forwand, now 84, was 77 when he began his long search, and 83 when it ended on an October day in 2018. This was when he found Marjorie Barnes, a 73-year-old widow from Virginia on Match.com.
“I liked him right away because he was really, really funny,” said Ms. Barnes, who communicated with Dr. Forwand via texts before they met in person. “I told him that humor is very important to me.”
“Are you adventurous,” he asked during their text exchange.
“Yes, I like to travel and see new things,” she said.
He had a suggestion: “Why not hop on a plane to meet me in Florida, where I’ll show you a good time.”
She offered another suggestion: “If you want to get together, you’ll have to come up to Virginia Beach and be my escort to the opera.”
With potential plans to be discussed, he asked if she would prefer to continue chatting by phone rather than text.
“Nah,” she said. “Why don’t we just wing it.”
Thirty minutes later, he sent her yet another text. “I just booked a flight to Virginia Beach for next week,” he wrote. “Can you pick me up at the airport?”
She told him she would be there in her Audi convertible, and knowing from his profile photo that he was completely bald, added, “unless of course you think it will mess up your hair.”
He said it wasn’t a problem, and sounded somewhat serious when he told her that he would wear a hat.
A week later, when he got into her convertible, Dr. Forwand’s sense of humor was on display.
“He wore a baseball cap that covered the top of a long, gray ponytail running down his back,” Ms. Barnes said. “I just about ran off the road laughing, and that was the beginning of the whole thing.”
Ms. Barnes grew up with three brothers on a dairy farm, owned by her parents, the late Evelyn Friend and the late Willard Swartzentruber, in Oakland, Md.
Ms. Barnes graduated from Franklin Medical Arts College in Philadelphia with a degree in X-ray technology. At 19, she married her first husband, and soon found a job as an X-ray technician at the Shriners Hospital in Philadelphia.
Her marriage lasted 11 years and two daughters were born before she divorced and moved to Virginia Beach, “for no particular reason,” she said. “I just liked it there.”
She remained single for the next five years before meeting her second husband, Edward Barnes. They were married for 32 years, until Mr. Barnes’s death in 2013.
Unlike Dr. Forwand, who turned dating into an obsessive, 24-hour job, Ms. Barnes went out, albeit briefly, with just two men during her time as a widow.
“Both lacked spontaneity and humor, and couldn’t carry a conversation,” she said before starting to laugh. “Stanley does not have that problem. In fact, I can’t shut him up.”
“But I love him,” Ms. Barnes said in a recent telephone interview, shortly after scolding Dr. Forwand for reading a newspaper while she spackled their living room wall.
“It’s hard not to love Stanley, he’s so kind and generous,” she said. “Even my dog, Toby, an Aussiedoodle, loves him.”
Dr. Forwand grew up in the Bronx, graduated from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and received a medical degree from Columbia. He is the only child of the late Hilda Forwand, a bookkeeper who also modeled ladies’ clothing, and the late Henry Forwand, a milliner who made artificial flowers that were used to decorate hats.
Dr. Forwand married his first wife at 38, and they lasted 38 years before getting divorced. They lived in Cambridge, Mass., where Dr. Forwand served as the chief of cardiology at Mount Auburn Hospital, from 1967 until he retired in 2005, the same year he moved to Sarasota, Fla.
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He eventually settled in Nokomis, and still practices medicine two days a month by covering for a fellow cardiologist in Tampa, where he handles an average caseload of 30 patients a day. Getting to work requires a two-hour, 140-mile round-trip each of those two days. In his spare time, he volunteers at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.
Eight months after divorcing his first wife, Dr. Forwand married again. “I started reading how elderly men die when they become single and I didn’t want that to happen to me,” he said. “It was not a healthy relationship.”
A year and a half later, he divorced again, and by the time he turned 77, was “completely lost in the internet dating wilderness,” as he put it.
“I was taught as a kid that if something is really important to you, and you want to be good at it, you have to work hard in order to get it,” Dr. Forwand said. “Well, I worked damn hard at finding someone to be with. It was insane I tell you, I could write a book about it.”
If so, he would surely include the time he drove two and a half hours to a restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to meet a woman he had taken to dinner on a first date the week before.
“She seemed so nice, we had a great meal and a great conversation on that first date,” he said. “So as I’m driving to our second date, I call her and say ‘Why don’t I pick you up this time at your house?’”
“She says to me ‘Oh no, I never let strangers in my house,’” he said, retelling the story in a voice that kept rising.
“I thought to myself, ‘Strangers, by golly, I just spent four and a half hours with you, and paid for dinner, and now I’m a stranger?’”
“Needless to say, I never saw her again, but things like that kept happening over and over again,” he added. “At the end of the day, I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I met my princess.”
Dr. Forwand’s son, Ames Forwand, who lives in Oakland, Calif., said of his father: “He’s the smartest guy I know. I’m happy he has found what he was looking for.”
Marsha Ciccolo, a longtime friend of Dr. Forwand, said that his life would make “one of funniest reality TV shows ever.”
To those who know him best, Dr. Forwand’s sense of humor is as sharp and cutting as a scalpel. When asked what the best part of his life has been since meeting Ms. Barnes, Dr. Forwand said, “sex and the dog.”
The couple were married Nov. 2 at their cul-de-sac home in Nokomis, on a thankfully cool and breezy day, as their air-conditioning system had broken down the day before and was undergoing repairs.
A half-hour before guests began arriving, the bride was still wrapped in an apron, setting out mozzarella balls, cucumber slices and asking for a volunteer to cut rosemary from the side yard to complete what she called the “grazing table.”
She soon exchanged her apron for an elegant Nicole Miller white ensemble with dynamic ruching and exposed back zippers. The groom wore tan dress shorts and a crisp shirt with a purple orchid boutonniere, creating a casual and informal vibe. The 20 guests gathered by a small, waterfront dock on the couple’s property, waiting for the ceremony to begin.
“It has been so wonderful to see our mom break through from such sadness into being so happy,” said Tonya Leonard of Charlottesville, Va., who is one of the bride’s daughters. Walter Ciccolo, a longtime friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, watched them approach the dock, hand in hand, in the soft light of a sunset. Toby stood by their side, looking debonair in a black bow tie.
“What a great couple,” Mr. Ciccolo said. “It’s so refreshing to see such happiness.”
During the exchange of vows, the bride told the groom through tears, “We will look back on life and have no regrets — from this day forward, you will never walk alone.”
ON THIS DAY
When Nov. 2, 2019, which was exactly a year after the day the couple met.
Where The couple’s home in Nokomis, Fla.
The Menu The seafood-themed menu included ceviche and bowls of clam chowder and conch chowder, a nod to the groom’s time in New England. The cake, filled with meringue and whipped cream, was baked by the bride’s friend, Vicky Rudnitsky.
Tribute to Mom Celebrating the memories of her youth, the bride wore her mother’s opal pendant necklace and bracelet.
Here’s Looking at You, Kids Cheers from bubble-blowing guests, combined with a recording of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder, could be heard during a FaceTime session with two of the bride’s granddaughters from Virginia who were unable to attend.
