The first-ever Golden Bachelorette, Joan Vassos, has revealed some of the kind advice that she got from the first-ever GoldenBachelor, Gerry Turner.
Vassos opened up about her upcoming journey to find love, as part of her season with the ABC franchise, during a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight. The 61-year-old first appeared on Turner’s season of The Golden Bachelor, but she ultimately went home early due to a family emergency. In The Golden Bachelorette, fans will see Vassos date a series of men who are in their sixties and over, before getting engaged during the season finale.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Vassos confirmed that she’s still in touch with Turner, while praising the type of leading man that he was on The Golden Bachelor.
“We text all the time. He’s a very, very good friend,” she said. “He did this so well. He kind of created the road map that we have now. There’s no rulebook, and he kind of wrote it a little bit.”
She went on to detail the approach he encouraged her to take when dating, before acknowledging how fast relationships can progress on the show.
“He exemplified somebody who is very open and vulnerable. He said that’s what you need to be from day one, because you don’t have a lot of time,” she explained about Turner, who recently finalized his divorce from Golden Bachelor contestant Theresa Nist. “This is a quick journey. You can’t leave anything on the table. I feel like day one, starting conversation one, everything you do here is important.”
Vassos also opened up about how sad she was to leave The Golden Bachelor due to her daughter’s health concern, and she noted that she didn’t expect to be a fan favorite afterward.
“I so thought that I was gonna be that girl who left that nobody remembers. I truly believed that was gonna be the outcome,” she continued. “I really was sad about that, honestly, because I loved being here. I think the process worked. I was sad when I had to leave, so having the opportunity to come back and [having] people actually remember me a little bit [is amazing].”
Vassos, whose husband of 32 years died in 2021, confessed that while she’s nervous about filming her season of The Golden Bachelorette, she’s focused on “the bigger story” behind the show, which is that people in their late sixties and seventies can continue dating.
“The hope is that by watching someone doing it successfully and having fun, it still being dignified and that you can be a little selfish and that you deserve love,” she added. “I am just an example. I am just one of the many people that should be doing this and feel like you are entitled to have love in your life.”
She further expressed that her story can be relatable because it shows “just the concept of finding love” and how that can be “hard.”
“Meeting love out in the wild, organically, is not super easy,” she added. “People now do dating apps and set you up. There are many ways to find love, this just happens to be one of them and it’s on TV.”
Following the success of the first season of The Golden Bachelor, ABC ordered a season of The Golden Bachelorette, with season one airing in September. The former was lauded as one of the highest-rated series of the 2024-2025 broadcast season, with adults between ages 18 to 49 tuning in at record numbers across seven days. Since its premiere, the inaugural series has reached more than 43.5 million viewers.
The Golden Bachelor concluded with Turner proposing to Nist, whom he later married during a live special on ABC in January. However, the pair unfortunately shared that they were divorcing three months later in April in an interview with Good Morning America.
“Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation, so forth and – and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to – dissolve our marriage,” Turner revealed to GMA host Juju Chang.
Nist noted that their search for a home ultimately led to their marriage falling apart. Although the pair had been looking for houses in South Carolina and New Jersey, they never finalized their plans.
Earlier this month, Nist and Turner finalized their divorce, with a marital settlement agreement reading that “certain irreconcilable differences heretofore arisen between the parties culminated in their separation.” The documents also stated that Turner and Nist are entitled to their “sole and separate property” including housing and bank accounts.
