The first-ever Golden Bachelor will tie the knot live on TV!
The first season of The Golden Bachelor is in the books! Now, fans will be able to see the 71-year-old marry his pick, live on air.
Fans were in for a whirlwind of emotions this season, following the first-ever Golden Bachelor as he navigated his way through finding love again.
Gerry Turner was announced as the star of ABC’s latest Bachelor spinoff show in July 2023. Before the show started airing, Turner said he was pushed to join by his two daughters after their mother, Turner’s wife, passed away.
While the pressure from being the first Golden Bachelor could make any man nervous, Gerry told GMA that being the first elderly man to lead the show “feels amazing and it’s still sinking in.”
Ahead of the show’s premiere in Sept. 2023, Turner shared with PEOPLE that he was ecstatic with how his first night went. He said, “It was literally like Christmas morning.”
“Every package [that] gets opened is better than the previous,” he said about meeting the women for the first time. “At 7:30 the next morning, I was still wide awake and still wired that the producers told me and almost literally took me by the arm and said I had to leave. I can’t tell you how much fun I had in those nine hours.”
While he was seemingly impressed with all of the women he met that night, he insisted that he made sure to keep his eye on the prize throughout the season as he looked for “the one.”
Now, Turner has found love, and he’s ready to tie the knot in a ceremony that fans will get to watch live on TV!
On the season finale of The Golden Bachelor, Turner got engaged to Theresa Nist.
Gerry’s wedding comes after he eliminated runner-up Leslie Fhima in the season finale of the show.
The final episode of the series came down to the wire as viewers watched Gerry struggling with the decision of letting either Leslie or Theresa go.
During the episode, he admitted that the “stress and pressure” of making a “decision that was life-changing” was getting to him. In response, Leslie told him, “I don’t know how you do it. I’m only concentrating on you. You have two of us.”
But in the end, when it came time to make his decision, Gerry selected Theresa.
“I have fallen in love with Theresa,” he told Leslie. “That’s the direction I’m going to go in.”
“You both are wonderful but only one of you is right,” he declared.
After announcing his decision, Turner held Leslie while she cried in his arms, and he admitted he was “not OK” with the breakup.
“I took a good person and I broke their heart. I hate myself and I hate everything,” he said. “The only time I felt worse was when my wife passed away and this is a close goddamn second.”
Despite such intense, conflicting emotions he felt letting Leslie go, Turner still felt like he made the right decision and chose the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with.
“She is a wonderful woman,” he said of Theresa. “She’s charming and so affectionate. She’s smart, perceptive and intuitive.”
He went on to call Theresa, “Someone to share the joy and the sorrow [with].”
“I love her and I know she loves me,” Gerry continued.
Now that the happy couple are engaged, they’re planning to get hitched live on television. Their wedding will air on ABC on Thursday, Jan. 4 at 8pm EST.
Turner is from Indiana, where he lives “in his dream house on a beautiful lake,” according to The Golden Bachelor’s official synopsis.
But, the former Bachelor told PEOPLE that he and his new fiancée–who is from New Jersey–plan to move south to Charleston, South Carolina, after getting married.
“One of the things that I think fate played a hand in is the possibility of where we might wind up living,” Turner told the outlet. “For the last couple of years, when my family gets together, I’ve talked about moving to South Carolina, and it’s an idea I’ve toyed with.”
“And then in conversation with Theresa, a private moment, she’s saying, ‘Well, yeah, my son lives near Charleston in South Carolina,'” Gerry revealed.
When he first started this process, Turner was concerned that whoever he ended up with might not be on the same page regarding where to live–but with Nist, it wasn’t a problem.
“And all of a sudden it’s like, there’s a big problem that is gone,” Turner said. “The issue of compromising on where to live and how to reconcile families and all of that is, it’s no longer an issue.”
While Gerry revealed previously that his kids encouraged him to sign up for the show, he also admits that it didn’t take too much convincing to make it happen.
“When they sent me a text about it, I had seen the ads throughout the show. In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘That would be quite an experience. That would be a lot of fun,’” he said.
“So when they really hit me up hard with it one night, they didn’t have to push as hard as what they maybe thought,” Turner admitted. “It was a back-and-forth in my head before I decided to actually fill out a questionnaire online, but I’m certainly glad I did.”
Gerry married his high school sweetheart, Toni, in 1974. They lived a “full and happy life” until Toni’s sudden death in 2017, just six weeks after she retired and fell ill.
“She got robbed. Every day that goes by, that’s the thought that I have,” Turner told GMA.
Now, Turner gets to work through that loss with his new fiancée, and the two of them are all wrapped up in wedding planning–and they’re getting a lot of help from their daughters.
“We have daughters who are so involved,” Nist told PEOPLE in a joint interview with Turner. “My daughter, she’s seen a million weddings and she is incredible. She’s put together the vision board. She’s asking me, ‘Do you like this? Do you like this?’ And I go, ‘Wow, okay, I don’t even have to do this. This is awesome.’ She’s handling it pretty much.”