Joan Vassos doesn’t need her stint as the Golden Bachelorette to end with an engagement.
In an interview with People magazine ahead of the Golden Bachelor spinoff’s premiere, Vassos noted, “I said all along I didn’t need to leave engaged.” Instead, her goal was “to leave in a committed relationship.”
“I wanted to have somebody I saw a future with and that we wanted to see how it works in the real world outside of the Bachelor bubble,” she explained. “I didn’t want to go through all of this and be at the same place I was when I came to the mansion.”
After Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner’s marriage ended in divorce due to disagreements with ex-wife Theresa Nist over where to relocate, Vassos has maintained from the get-go that leaving her home in Maryland is non-negotiable.
“I would never want to leave my family,” she confirmed. “My kids and my grandkids all live really close to me and not being close to them all the time would not work for me. They’re the most important people in my life. I felt that anybody that I would be a good match for, they would have the same family values as I have and would not want to leave their family.”
This doesn’t mean that she’s ruling out a long-distance relationship. “My thought was that, depending on your working status, you could go and spend two weeks at their house and two weeks at your house, or have another location where you would all gather and maybe each other’s families would come,” Vassos said. “You figure it out for a while until you figure out a permanent arrangement, and that could be, feasibly, years.”
Vassos also confirmed that following her time vying for Turner’s heart on The Golden Bachelor, she has not tried dating. That’s in part because she was asked to be the Golden Bachelorette shortly after parting ways with Turner on the show. “I posted a video in the beginning of the year and I said my New Year’s resolutions, and one of them was to get back out there and start dating,” she said. “And then I got a call soon after that saying that they were considering me as a potential Golden Bachelorette, and was I interested? So then I definitely didn’t date.”
The Golden Bachelorette premieres on ABC on Wednesday, Sept. 18.
