Former Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner has found love again after his whirlwind marriage to Theresa Nist.
“I am dating someone,” Turner, 73, revealed on the Tuesday, April 15, episode of the “Bachelor Happy Hour” podcast. “I think at this point it’s going well. But I don’t want to say too much and jinx it and I’m trying to respectfully get to a point where there’s an acceptable amount of time from my divorce. Maybe that’s an old fashioned thought — maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I think it does, but to be respectful, I kind of want to slow roll this.”
While Turner remained tight-lipped about his new love’s name , he shared that she also has daughters. (Turner is the dad of two daughters whom he welcomed with late wife Toni.)
“I think the fun part there is she has daughters that I really relate to, and she relates well to my daughters,” he said. “So we’ve been around each other briefly. It’s been fun. It’s been a very enjoyable encounter.”
Turner — who revealed in December 2024 that he was diagnosed with an incurable cancer — praised his new girlfriend for her adventurous spirit.
“The person I’m dating will say, ‘Do you want to go do?’ And before she gets out the rest of the sentence I will say, ‘Yes,’” Turner said, adding that his new girlfriend’s life experiences have included “a lot of travel.”
Turner confirmed that he told Nist he’s dating someone new, so the news won’t come as a shock to her. Before telling Nist about his new girlfriend, Turner said he asked for advice from Golden Bachelor exes Joan Vassos and Leslie Fhima.
“I said, ‘To be respectful and to do the right thing, when should I talk to Theresa about this and let her know?’ And their advice was to talk to her soon,” he recalled. “So on the car ride from the hotel to the airport [After the Final Rose] the next day, I called Theresa. We had a really nice conversation, and, you know, I let her know.”
Turner gushed that he knew he had a connection with his new girlfriend almost immediately.
“I hate to say it because I know I’m going to get baseballs thrown at me. It was almost the first time I saw her. It was the look that she gave me. It was like, all of a sudden, I was consumed by this look and I had this actual physical feeling and I pushed it off. I go, ‘That was silly, that’s ridiculous.’ And with every encounter that feeling has instantly come back with her look and it’s like, ‘Damn, this is pretty awesome,’” he said.
When asked whether he felt that feeling with any women on his season, Turner shared, “I think the closest to that was when Faith [Martin] played the guitar and sang to me on I think it was the first night she got the first impression rose. That would be the closest to it.”
Bachelor Nation met Turner when he starred as the lead of the first-ever Golden Bachelor in 2023. Turner, who ended his season engaged to Nist, tied the knot with his winner in 2024. Months later, the pair revealed their split.
“I don’t think we were ever on bad terms, I think from my side of it, my perspective, I withdrew from her. I felt like maybe I was a source of bad feelings and the negativity that came out of the show and so forth,” he said of his relationship with Nist. “So I kind of avoided talking to her, and not out of you know, ill will or being combat of it all, just I thought it was better if we gave each other space. Maybe I was wrong with that and now I intend to go a different direction with it.”
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