The Golden Bachelor alum Theresa Nist has revealed her regrets when reflecting on her romance with Gerry Turner, including a Fantasy-Suite moment she wishes she had handled differently.
“I always said that I like to live my life without regrets, but boy, I made some mistakes here. I really did. I regret getting married so quickly; that shouldn’t have happened,” Theresa admitted during a recent appearance on the “Dear Shandy” podcast.
Gerry proposed marriage to Theresa on The Golden Bachelor’s Season 1 finale, which aired in November 2023, and then they rushed to tie the knot on January 4, 2024 for a live televised wedding special on ABC.
“We shouldn’t have [gotten married] that fast. It was that [ABC] was offering it to us then and there and not later. And I thought that all the things that were going wrong were going to be fine,” Theresa said.
“I thought, ‘We are going to have a great life together’… I shouldn’t have done it. It was not a good decision.”
But Theresa’s regrets apparently go back even further than her quickie wedding to Gerry.
“I regret not bringing up, ‘Who should you really be with?’ [in the Fantasy Suite]. That really was my intention, to say, ‘I’m going to help you here. I’m going to help you make a decision,'” Theresa recalled.
“But then I didn’t do that, and I regret not doing that.”
Theresa said that when her Fantasy Suite date with Gerry began, she didn’t even think she was “in the running” to win his heart.
Up to that point, Theresa said she had struggled to be herself on-camera, and she called her final horseback riding date with Gerry “lame” and “miserable.”
Theresa — who didn’t think Gerry viewed her as fun or adventurous — was therefore convinced Gerry was going to pick Leslie at the Final Rose Ceremony.
“But in the Fantasy Suite, it changed completely — and he does describe this in the book — that I decided I was going to help him make a decision,” Theresa said, referring to Gerry’s memoir Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV.
“I was going to get a piece of paper and say, ‘Okay, here is Theresa and here is Leslie, and which one should you pick?’ Because nobody was there to help him.”
But Theresa said instead of taking a practical and logical approach, she put the moves on Gerry.
“I said, ‘Oh, let me kiss him first,'” Theresa confessed, adding that she “knocked his socks off” that evening behind closed doors.
“I’m really serious. He was blown away by the kisses. It was a good kiss. It was good kissing.”
Theresa said about 30-40 minutes into their overnight date, Gerry started “proclaiming his love” to her and how he was going to propose marriage at the end of his season.
“I was shocked, because I thought it was Leslie,” Theresa reiterated.
Theresa said if she had seen Gerry and Leslie’s dates and interactions beforehand, she would’ve known that Leslie and Gerry made more sense together as a couple.
“I would’ve stopped him [from picking me], and I would’ve said, ‘What are you doing?! You’ve got this thing going with Leslie! It’s not me. It’s her,'” Theresa shared.
Theresa apparently had “a gut feeling” during The Golden Bachelor process that Gerry wasn’t her match but she never acted on it.
Theresa said once she watched Gerry’s The Golden Bachelor season on TV, she was able to “put the pieces together.”
Theresa explained, “And honestly, he really liked [Joan Vassos]! He had a really big thing for Joan. He said that he waited a week for her to come back, and then I saw the thing with Leslie.”
“And so when I saw [excerpts from] Gerry’s book, I thought, ‘Wow, now it makes all the sense in the world. He regretted marrying me,'” she noted.
Gerry wrote in his book that he had a conversation with The Golden Bachelor alum Faith Martin the night before his wedding in which he confessed he was having major doubts about becoming Theresa’s husband.
“He [told Faith], ‘I feel trapped.’ Well tell me [that]! I would’ve been relieved. He said, ‘Marrying Theresa is the wrong thing,’ and she gave him good advice!” Theresa acknowledged.
Theresa recalled how Faith had told Gerry, “You don’t have to do this,” and she added, “I wish he listened to her advice. He said it was out of a sense of obligation; I don’t need a man to marry me. I’ve been deeply loved in my life by my husband.”
Theresa said, in hindsight, Gerry is a good person but he did have “a very bad temper” that negatively impacted their marriage.
The New Jersey mom also claimed they lacked physical intimacy after filming the show because Gerry never initiated it. (Gerry essentially claimed it was the other way around).
“He did call me names and he did put me down, and I couldn’t understand why he was doing that. And it makes so much sense now, because he didn’t want to marry me, and that’s the bottom line,” she concluded.
Gerry and Theresa announced their split in April 2024, and Gerry filed for divorce that same month.
The pair’s divorce was finalized in June 2024, and Gerry has since moved on with a retired Indiana teacher, Lana Sutton.
Gerry announced his engagement to Lana in October.
