Gerry Turner of “The Golden Bachelor” and Theresa Nist Are Getting Married Next Month—Here’s Why They’re Having a Short Engagement

The first season of ABC’s hit reality show The Golden Bachelor culminated on November 30, 2023, in an epic proposal. Gerry Turner, the leading man of the season, popped the question to Theresa Nist during the grand finale—and she said “yes.” After Turner got down on one knee, the couple recapped the last episode during After the Final Rose. Although fans just learned about their engagement, the couple revealed that their wedding—which will be a live, televised special—will take place next month on January 4, 2024.

In an interview with People, which was published on December 1, 2023, Turner explained the reason behind his choice to marry his fiancée so soon. “When you’re in your 20s and you put something off for a year, it’s a very small percentage of your life,” Turner said. “In your 70s, the clock ticks faster, and I’m 100 percent certain I found the right girl for me. So, it’s like, ‘Why not?’” Likewise, Nist didn’t want to wait either. “I met the man of my dreams,” she gushed. “It wasn’t our original timeline, but to be presented with the wedding of our dreams? Spectacular, incredible, wow!”

Even though Turner and Nist are having a short engagement without much time to plan their nuptials, neither of them are worried. “We’ll figure it out,” Turner said. “Everything else is secondary and less important than us being together.” 

However, the show’s leading man wants to make sure that his fiancée doesn’t feel rushed into marrying him since she only had three days to plan her first wedding to her childhood sweetheart, Billy. “Since she’d sort of gotten the hurry-up job the first time, I wanted her to be able to savor all of the anticipation and the joy and the planning and everything,” Turner shared. “That was my only question: ‘Are you OK with the timeline? Do you feel like you get cheated a little bit in it?’” Nist replied that she doesn’t feel cheated "at all." “It’s going to be incredible,” she exclaimed.

Nist explained that when she was a freshman in college, her previous boyfriend, Billy, was drafted in the Vietnam War, so he left for Berlin. While overseas, Billy repeatedly told Nist that he wanted to marry her, but when Billy came back to New Jersey for his brother’s wedding, he proposed for real—and Nist finally accepted it. “My mother went into action, and we got married on a Tuesday,” she recounted. “We had a gown, a veil, a cake, a photographer, music—really in the basement of my house. There was no diamond ring, so this is brand new and amazing.” During the series finale, Turner popped the question with a princess-cut diamond engagement ring, flanked by two baguette-cut diamonds and set with 128 brilliant-cut diamonds, from Neil Lane. 

Both Turner—whose former wife Toni passed away in 2017—and Nist feel that this engagement is different than their first. “We’ve never talked about raising children,” Turner said. “We don’t talk about careers. We don’t worry about how we’re going to pay the bills. We talk about what we’re going to do to have fun, whether it’s going to be playing golf or pickleball. That was never a conversation with my wife and I the first time around. We were worried about, ‘Do we have enough money to buy dinner tomorrow night?’ Everything is different. The excitement level is different.”