Bachelor Nation
‘Golden Bachelor’s Theresa Nist Shares Rare Update About Gerry Turner Relationship After Divorce
As The Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner moves on with new girlfriend Lana Sutton, his ex-wife Theresa Nist is reflecting on their split and revealing where she stands with him today.
The New Jersey resident opened up about Turner’s new relationship, which she found out about when he called her to share the news before it went public.
“He said, ‘I just wanna let you know, I met someone,'” Nist told Us Weekly. “I said, ‘That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.'” While Nist noted that her ex said he was “afraid” to tell her about his updated love life, she assured him that she only wants “happiness” for him.
“Like, if this was the way it happened for him to find his person … to go on the show, get married, and then find his person this way … then it was meant to be,” she added.
Nist and Turner tied the knot in January 2024, but announced their split less than three months later. Their divorce was finalized that June. While Nist said she has no regrets, she also admitted that she and Turner may have made a hasty decision when they agreed to get married so quickly in a televised wedding.
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“We probably should have waited,” she said, adding, “It’s not that they were saying to us, ‘Okay, we’re offering you this wedding and you can do it six months, a year, two years, whenever you want to.’ It was now or never. The decision had to be made quickly. And we said, ‘Okay, if we’re really going to go through with this and we’re gonna get married, if we do it this way, we can get the wedding of our dreams. It’ll be spectacular.’ It was a quick decision.”
However, she insisted that she was truly “in love” with Turner when she married him. As for the split, Nist revealed, “I don’t know if I’ll ever say what the reason was for me.” Despite speculation that distance and Turner’s cancer diagnosis led to the breakup, Nist insisted that there was more to it.
“I will say that it’s really hard to know somebody in that amount of time,” Nist explained. “And then after the show was over, it was just a whirlwind of excitement, and we were caught up in everything and there were interviews and we were going to events. It was also an abbreviated version of The Bachelor. We only had one-hour episodes. And so the amount of time that I was with him was what you saw on TV. There was no other casual interaction, like, there might be on Bachelor in Paradise where you can hang out.”
Turner himself said in December 2024 that his Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia diagnosis “had a huge bearing on [his] decisions” after he was diagnosed in February 2024. He also theorized that the same “probably” went for his wife. However, she made it clear that the cancer was “not the reason whatsoever.”
“That was never a discussion,” she confirmed. “I was quite surprised to read that. He said that and said he would imagine it was my reason too. It was not at all my reason. I would’ve stuck with him through thick. My husband of 42 years, Billy, was sick for the last five years of his life and I stayed with him and took care of him. He said, ‘It weighed heavily into my decision,’ I think, and, ‘I would imagine into Theresa’s too.’ So he just imagined that [because] there was no discussion.”
She also made it clear that she’s glad to see Turner doing well. “I’m so happy for him,” Nist added. “I want him to live a long, healthy, prosperous, wonderful life. I’m rooting for him. I don’t want him to be sick.”
