Gerry Turner and his fiancée, Theresa Nist, updated fans on their relationship since getting engaged on The Golden Bachelor — and they’re getting a televised wedding special to kick off the new year.
Gerry, 72, and Theresa, 70, sat down with host Jesse Palmer during the After the Final Rose segment of the season 1 finale, which aired on Thursday, November 30. After congratulatory messages were out of the way, the newly-engaged couple shared some pretty intimate details about the overnight date that officially sealed their love.
“I realized all of a sudden, here was a woman who knew how to maintain and nurture a relationship,” Gerry said. Theresa chimed in, adding, “He’s not going to tell you exactly what happened in the fantasy suite, I’ll tell you. I knocked his boots off.”
The couple then revealed that they’ve been living in bliss since getting engaged. While they’ve gone back to their normal lives, Theresa confirmed she and Gerry speak on on the phone for hours “every day.”
“We have gotten into deeper and deeper conversations,” she gushed. “We just laugh so much. It’s been great.”
Jesse, for his part, surprised Gerry and Theresa with a trip to Italy, before the Golden Bachelor himself revealed the couple’s plans to get married “right away.” Jesse then announced that The Golden Wedding would air via ABC on Thursday, January 4, and chronicle Gerry and Theresa’s journey down the aisle.
Before the show started airing, Gerry confessed that he was initially against remarrying after the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years, Toni.
“As I was dating [before the show], I was looking for the person that I would spend the rest of my life with regardless of the label,” he exclusively told Us Weekly in October. “And as I got closer and closer to the process started in the show, I really kind of came to realize that I did indeed want to be married, that I wanted that commitment, that two-way street. And so as I got into the show, that was my objective.”
While reflecting on his previous marriage, Gerry noted that Toni would be “excited” about the “good conclusion” to his Golden Bachelor journey, adding, “I was happy with how it turned out.”
Before proposing to Theresa, Gerry said an emotional goodbye to Leslie Fhima after telling both women that he loved them. Although such confessions to multiple contestants are common in the Bachelor franchise, Gerry never believed he would fall for more than one woman.
“I thought, ‘No, that’s absolutely not possible. That’s silly.’ How wrong I was,” he told Us in September. “Because through the course of the journey, I really felt strong feelings for several of the women.”
Amid his engagement to Theresa, though, Gerry acknowledged that he was not fully “in love” with multiple contestants.
“In retrospect, I realized that in that particular moment, whenever it was — the setting was such that, ‘Yeah, it was easy to look at someone and tell ‘em you loved ‘em,’” he explained. “But once you get through it all and you look back, then you realize that there is just really one person that really meets the standard in all situations that you want it to be.”
Meanwhile, Theresa found herself in the midst of drama earlier in the season when Kathy Swarts accused her of bragging about her connection with Gerry. Theresa insisted via Instagram in October that she “never ever intended to make Kathy or anyone feel less than.”
“I am grateful to all of you that could see that I had only good intentions and that I felt absolutely terrible when I realized I had hurt Kathy’s feelings,” she continued. “Thank you to my friends and family that know me and know that I would never mean to make someone else feel bad in any way, and to my new friends that can already see that in me as well.”
