Bachelor Nation was left stunned when The Golden Bachelor couple Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist split just three months after their TV wedding. At the time, the couple blamed their divorce on distance and not being able to settle on a place to live.
Almost a year to the day that the former couple announced their breakup on Good Morning America, Turner opened up about the end of his relationship with Nist in a rare interview.
When asked what went wrong in his short-lived marriage on the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast, Turner responded, “Well, I’m not so sure anything went wrong. We’ve had conversations, and I think our mutual, deep devotion to our families kind of reared its head in conversations, and we started trying to realize or trying to find that common ground, the commonality of where we could share a life and where we could share a home and so forth.”
He continued, “Then she being a brand new grandmother and I had gone through the loss of a spouse and feeling the support of my daughters, it almost created a situation where we recognized fairly quickly that we weren’t going to find that spot where we could be together. And I thought more than anything that was it.”
The 73-year-old acknowledges the “mutual admiration and respect and empathy” between him and his ex, which allows them to understand their situation.
Host Serena Pitt followed up and asked Turner if he’d still be together with Nist if their families had been in the same place. “So that’s a difficult hypothetical question based on what I know and based on the experiences that we had back then,” Turner said. “If you eliminate that huge obstacle, I can see no red flags. I still don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t have worked out. But we were also so new to the relationship that we may not have uncovered that layer of the onion that could have been a problem yet. So it’s hard to answer that.”
Turner and Nist finalized their divorce in June 2024. During his podcast conversation, the former Golden Bachelor lead revealed that he has a new girlfriend — and Nist knows about Turner’s latest love.
“I’m trying to, respectfully, get to a point where there’s an acceptable amount of time from my divorce,” he said. “Maybe that’s an old fashioned thought, maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I think it does, but to be respectful, I kind of want to slow roll this.”
