Golden Bachelorette star Joan Vassos will never forget her late husband, John Vassos . John died in 2021 at age 59 after battling pancreatic cancer. The couple was married for 32 years and share four children.
After two years of grieving, Joan decided she was ready to put herself back out there. “I did not want to spend my life alone, so I knew that I had to take action, but my heart wasn’t there at all,” Joan recalled during an interview with CNN in May. “I was saying to my friend, ‘How in the world do you date now? Look around this restaurant.
Everybody here is a couple. Everybody my age is married. All my friends are married.
’” When she got home from dinner that evening, she saw a Golden Bachelor casting call on TV. “I was like, ‘The universe is talking to me,'” Joan said. Joan became a contestant on the debut season starring Gerry Turner .
She left during week 3 because of a family emergency involving her daughter who had just given birth. Gerry, 72, ultimately got engaged to finalist Theresa Nist , and they officially tied the knot during a televised wedding in January. The Bachelor Nation couple split in April, but Joan said she still learned a lot from Gerry about finding love on the ABC franchise.
“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,” Joan told Entertainment Tonight in June about her “good friend” in an interview published on June .
