Bachelor Nation
‘Golden Bachelor’: Theresa Nist Reveals Gerry Turner Living Situation Wasn’t Only Reason For Shocking Split
The Golden Bachelor couple Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist‘s shocking divorce left everyone stunned. Months after their announcement, the inaugural season’s winner is divulging more information about what led to their split.
The couple had a whirlwind romance. They got engaged during the finale of The Bachelor spinoff and quickly married in a live TV wedding. But not even three months later, they split up. Wasting no time, the divorce that was originally announced in April was finalized in June.
Gerry and Theresa both shared a post thanking each other for their journey together as they told the world about the split. But, when clearing up some misconceptions on the Almost Famous podcast, Theresa was ready to spill some drama about what happened between them.
“It’s not just the location thing,” she said on the November 4 episode. “You really can’t know someone in four weeks. I’ll just say that. That’s all I can say. I don’t want to say any more than that.”
When asked by Ashley Iaconetti whether the four weeks occurred during filming for The Golden Bachelor, which ran from September to November 2023, or after cameras stopped rolling, Theresa was quick to spill that it was the latter. Theresa said she and Gerry “got to know each other better” following their on-camera engagement. This made her begin to realize how little she actually knew about Gerry prior to their marriage.
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Bringing up an anecdote that should’ve been a warning, she recalled that her daughter Jen Wooltson’s 6-year-old son, Henry told her right before her televised January wedding ceremony, “‘I just thought of this, you had one date and you’re getting married!’”
However, the 71-year-old still tied the knot. Not trying to drag her former husband through the mud, she insisted that she went into their wedding with honest intentions. She blamed their decline on the rapid timeline between the engagement and the nuptials that was encouraged by calls from the network.
“I went into this really looking to fall in love and I did,” she stressed, noting that the free wedding ceremony from ABC incentivized their quick commitment. “We said, ‘Okay they’re offering this to us now’ Not later—it was now. And we said, ‘If we really are going to get married, we should do it because we’re going to get the wedding of our dreams. And we are older and why waste any time? Do it now.’”
After the wedding, things quickly went south for the pair. The New Jersey resident mentioned an awkward instance that happened between the then-married duo. “So we’re driving from the airport and it was like three hours and we’re getting closer to Gerry’s house,” she recalled. “So I see this open land — I don’t see crops, I just think it’s flat land — and I go, ‘Oh wow, you could build townhomes there!’ That’s all I said. And Gerry said, ‘Oh, so you wanna take the farmer’s land away from him?’ I go, ‘Note to self, don’t say that again.'”
Theresa said her comment illuminated a larger conversation about the couple’s differing views on land, which wasn’t her intention. Gerry supposedly got defensive over farmland being protected in the Midwest. It was also his Indiana roots and her family’s New Jersey ties that made their union difficult.
As she once again confirmed that their separation partially stemmed from the distance, some other information came to light. They had initial plans of settling down in Charleston, and they both had virtual viewings for houses. But Gerry suddenly changed his mind.
Instead of wanting to live in South Carolina full-time, he had a desire to split his time between the southern state and his home in Indiana. “He loves his house and I don’t blame him,” she said. That switch ended up becoming a dealbreaker, “It wasn’t what we had discussed,” she added. “It did change.”
“I didn’t want to go back and forth,” Theresa stated. “I wanted to have an established base with a beautiful home together with Gerry and then go visit our children.”
