Joan Vassos sees your comments about when she’s going to marry Chock Chapple — but she isn’t letting it affect their future plans.
“I feel like I owe The Bachelor something because I want people to actually see that this was successful and that you can find love later in life and you can actually find love on a show. Lots of us do,” Joan, 62, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview. “And there’s lots of very successful Bachelor couples out there. Just because they don’t all succeed doesn’t mean it’s not possible and that people aren’t there for the right reasons. I was just in Punta Cana with Charity [Lawson] and Dotun [Olubeko]. They haven’t gotten married yet. They hear about it all the time.”
Joan and Chock, 61, got engaged on the November 2024 finale of The Golden Bachelorette. (Meanwhile, OG Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner married his winner, Theresa Nist, two months after their finale, only for them to get divorced three months later.)
“We have the same [commentary],” Joan continued. “It’s important that people recognize that it’s a very weird journey that you go on when you do The Bachelor. You take a leap of faith right at the end. Like, ‘I think this is my person. I’m not positive, I have not lived with them in the outside world. I haven’t seen how they treat waiters and waitresses or service personnel. I haven’t seen how they interact with my family or how they get along with my friends.’ So you’re taking a leap of faith and then you go out and you start dating them and that dating takes a little bit of time.”
Disney/Christopher Willard The first-ever Golden Bachelorette, Joan Vassos, found her happily ever after with Chock Chapple. Joan met 24 men on the ABC reality show, which premiered in September 2024, and ultimately accepted a proposal from Chock on the beaches of Bora Bora. “From our first date in Disneyland, I thought I saw a future […]
According to Joan, there haven’t been any bumps in the road for her and Chock, but that doesn’t mean they need to rush down the aisle.
“Chock and I are in that part of it. It’s been great every second of it and it’s, maybe, solidified our relationship more and more and made that leap of faith seem like we absolutely did the right thing. We will get married, but we are not ready to plan a wedding out,” she told Us. “I’m meeting his friends, he’s meeting my friends. We’re spending time getting to know each other even more. There’s no rush. I don’t have a biological clock. I’m over that. I have four kids. It does [add] to the whole element of it. We’re not dying to build a house together. We both have homes. We have all those things that we’re not worried about doing. We’re just having fun being together. I want to say, like, ‘Let us be together! Let’s just have fun and date!’ We will get married, I just don’t know when.”
The pair also don’t feel pressure to officially live together.
“It’s been crazy. It’s totally unexpected. We both thought when we came off the show, we’d just live a life as a couple. We didn’t realize that the opportunities would continue, which has been such a blessing,” she explained. “We have lived a little bit of a jet set life and we don’t have to plan all of our meetings. When we don’t have anything to do for a TV or radio or podcast or whatever, we do have to figure out when we’re gonna get together, but we have so many of those weaved into him coming to Maryland or me going to Kansas that we actually haven’t spent a lot of times at either one of each other’s homes, which is exactly what we thought we would be doing.”
Joan wants to be an inspiration to other couples who find love later in life.
“People dating at an older age, I don’t think they realize how much fun it can be,” she said. “For the first time in your life, you have time and you have resources. You have money! When you’re younger, you’re spending money on your kids, you’re building a life, you’re buying a house, you’re doing all these things that cost a lot of money. [Now], you’re kind of through all that. You’re not sending your kids to college anymore. They’ve already graduated. You finally have time and resources and if you have your health, this is a darn fun, good time of life. All you people getting older and worried about your 60s, it could be the best time of your life.”
Golden Bachelorette star Joan Vassos will never forget her late husband, John Vassos. John died in 2021 at age 59 after battling pancreatic cancer. The couple was married for 32 years and share four children. After two years of grieving, Joan decided she was ready to put herself back out there. “I did not want […]
Joan was married to her late husband, John, for 32 years. He died in 2021. She will be honoring him with their four adult children, grandkids, friends and those who joined her “It’s Just A Sprain” team at PanCAN PurpleStride charity walk in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, April 26.
While Chock won’t be there, he has been supportive of her raising awareness for the disease that John fought.
“I’m so lucky that I got to be in this position that I get to keep talking about him and about why I’m involved. It keeps his memory alive. There are so many people out there that have this cancer or may get this cancer. It’s on track to be the second leading cause of cancer related deaths in the United States, so this could be a real part of people’s lives,” she explained to Us. “And I don’t think that pancreatic cancer is like that on the forefront — you think about other cancers, breast cancer, colon cancer as the ones that are more prevalent. This is moving its way up on that scale and that’s scary.”
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