Bachelor Nation
‘Golden Bachelorette’ Joan Vassos Was Happily Married for 32 Years: All About Her Late Husband
Joan Vassos is ready to embrace a new chapter. The first-ever Golden Bachelorette will seek a new love in her golden years. With 24 handsome suitors to choose from, Joan has a lot of options.
But who was Joan’s first love? Joan was married for decades before she was on The Golden Bachelor and then The Golden Bachelorette. Look back at Joan’s first great love story and learn more about her husband.
Who was Joan married to?
Joan was married to John Vassos for 32 years. She revealed to The New York Times that she met her husband at a bar in Ocean City, Maryland, before her junior year at the University of Maryland. They wed in 1988.
John owned and operated BCE Corporation and CapX Solutions. Joan started out writing code for AT&T before turning to education and working as a school administrator in Maryland.
What happened to Joan’s husband?
John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on Valentine’s Day in 2019. He died on January 18, 2021, two years after his diagnosis.
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“Some days it seems like it just happened and I can’t catch my breath, still feeling the shock of it,” Joan said in a message she wrote on the anniversary of her late husband’s death. “Other days it feels like he’s been gone a lifetime, those days are worse because I’m afraid the memories are fading. I think that’s what scares me the most.”
In a preview video for The Golden Bachelorette, Joan told her family, “I’m not here to replace Dad. I just want our family to be whole again.”
After John died, Joan admitted to PEOPLE that she didn’t “embrace the whole mourning thing.” During her Golden Bachelorette journey, she began “feeling really guilty, honestly, about having feelings for somebody else. I almost felt like I was cheating on John, which is crazy because he’s passed away.”
She worked with psychiatrists to help her deal with what she was feeling. “They said, ‘You don’t have to let go of John. Picture it like this: You have two balloons, one in each hand, and John is in a balloon in this hand, and your potential person that you’re going to fall in love with in this hand. You don’t have to let go of him from this hand to pick this one up and have a life with this one.’ And it was such a good lesson,” she told PEOPLE.
Did Joan and her husband have kids?
Joan and John had four kids together: Nicholas, Erica, Luke, and Allison Vassos.
The Golden Bachelorette, Season 1, Wednesdays, 8/7c, ABC
