Things aren’t exactly rosy between Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist as he prepares to release his new memoir. See what The Golden Bachelor exes have said about their three-month marriage and divorce.
It’s safe to say that Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist’s once golden relationship has been tarnished.
While it’s been over a year since The Golden Bachelor couple finalized their divorce, the drama has continued to steal fans’ attention for more than just a sec. Especially given the upcoming release of Gerry’s new memoir Golden Years: What I’ve Learned from Love, Loss, and Reality TV that sees him writing about the dissolution of their three-month marriage.
“I’m not worried. I think she should be worried,” he recently remarked to Us Weekly. “I think there’s going to be some things there that have not been said or revealed before, and I think it’s time for those things to be revealed.”
Gerry and Theresa met on the first-ever season of The Golden Bachelor, which premiered in September 2023 and followed their search for love after having both lost their spouses of more than 40 years. But in his book, the retired restauranteur questions the financial services professional’s motives for going on the show.
“It’s one of those litmus tests for women on the show—are they there for the right reasons?” he continued. “I gave Theresa full credit that she was…and then, as time went by, I kind of had to change my mind on that.”
The finale aired in November 2023 and ended with Theresa and Gerry not only getting engaged but also announcing they were tying the know just over a month later.
“We know that we have to enjoy life,” the bride told E! News ahead of their big day. “We don’t know how much time we have left, and we want to enjoy every single second.”
Still, the lead-up to the wedding wasn’t a bed of roses. In parts of his book shared by USA Today, Gerry recalls having a conversation with Golden Bachelor contestant Faith Martin the night before the ceremony in which he confessed that marrying Theresa felt like the “wrong thing to do” and that he was “trapped.”
And, yet, despite those second thoughts, Gerry wed Theresa in a live televised ceremony Jan. 4, 2024.
“It makes me very sad to think that he felt empty and trapped,” she recently told Us Weekly. “I wish he had said something and just ended it. But at least now I understand why he was so hurtful to me so many times. And I will say this. Those in glass houses should not throw stones. I do wish him all the best.”
As the two navigated their journey as newlyweds, there were more thorns.
“I still work,” Theresa said on the Dear Shandy Podcast in March 2024, “so that’s the hurdle.”
And with her based in New Jersey and Gerry in Indiana, finding a home together proved to be a bit more dramatic than planned. But for Gerry, where they’d live was “secondary” to how they’d live amid Theresa’s work schedule.
“I guess the difficult part is I went on to the show to find my partner, and I’ve been retired for a long time,” the 74-year-old added. “I wanted fun, adventure, I wanted to go and do. So that is the crux of it right now is when does that start?”
Ultimately, they couldn’t get on the same page. “When you take that element away,” he told Us Weekly, “that radically changed the situation for me.”
In April 2024, Gerry and Theresa announced on Good Morning America that they’d mutually decided to divorce—with him filing the same day. And while they insisted they still loved each other, he’s since expressed feeling like he was “made out to be a villain.”
“One of the grudges I had was that right before Theresa and I went on Good Morning America to announce that divorce, we agreed to each other that we would protect each other and I don’t feel like that happened,” he noted to Us. “The only person that could come to my defense was her and the only person that could come to her defense was me. I was disappointed that that didn’t occur, and I felt like I was taking the blunt of the situation.”
That’s not to say that Gerry blames the end of their union entirely on Theresa.
“I was a bit naïve,” he added. “I was a bad listener. I didn’t probe well enough, and that’s both for my sake and for Theresa’s. Had I been better at some of those areas, maybe there would have been a different end.”
There were other matters they’d been dealing with privately—with Gerry learning he had a type of cancer called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia in March 2024.
“When you are hit with that kind of news and the shock wears off after a few days or a few weeks and you regroup and you realize what’s important to you, that’s where you start to move forward,” he told People in December. “And I hope that people understand in retrospect now that that had a huge bearing on my decisions and I think probably Theresa’s as well.”
But from her end, Theresa denies Gerry’s diagnosis led to their divorce. “It had nothing to do with it. Nothing,” she shared on The Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous Podcast in June. “I would have never left my husband over an illness.”
And while Theresa may have accepted Gerry’s final rose, she won’t accept the way he’s described the breakdown of their relationship.
“Out of respect for his family, I had decided a long time ago to not say anything, to take the high road and to keep what happened between us, between us. So I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that Gerry has decided to talk about me in such a disparaging way,” the 72-year-old said in a recent statement to the She’s All Bach podcast. “Nothing he has said about me or how our conversations went is accurate or happened in the way he is describing it. I’m not sure if Gerry has a bad memory or if he just thought it would sound more dramatic with how he revised it.”
“It makes me really sad to know how empty and trapped he felt prior to our wedding,” she added. “I wish he had just been honest with me. I really believed he loved me but clearly he had me fooled. His behavior behind closed doors makes a lot more sense now.”
