Joan Vassos had intentions of returning to The Golden Bachelor for her second chance at love.
The television personality, 60, shared that she wanted to come back to pursue things with Gerry Turner following her self-elimination. Unfortunately, the timing for her comeback didn’t work out.
“I got home, and my plan was to give [my daughter] some care — I needed to get her some mental health care,” she told . “I was in the process of doing that, and I was approached, and they said, ‘Do you want to come back?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to come back, let me see how I’m doing with my daughter.’”
Production even booked her a flight back to the mansion “four or five days” after she left, but her plans were abandoned when her “daughter wasn’t doing good again.”
“We just hadn’t made it far enough — I hadn’t gotten her a doctor yet,” she said. “I had calls in but it just couldn’t unfold quick enough. It wasn’t in the cards.”
On Thursday’s The Women Tell-All episode, Joan gave more insight into her abrupt exit from the show. She revealed that she rushed to her daughter’s side after she experienced postpartum depression following the birth of her baby.
“I look at the journey that I left, and it was abrupt and I feel like I had unfinished business and I didn’t see all that about Gerry at the end there and him crying like that, and I feel really bad that I did that to him,” she explained.
When asked if it would have worked out with Gerry had she not left, the Maryland native said: “I think we had a good chance. Gerry helped make me feel visible because he looked at me, he cared about saying and he wanted to get to know me.”
Despite connecting with Gerry, Joan had a change of heart when she received a message from her daughter the next morning and broke down in tears over whether to leave the show to be with her family.
She told Gerry, “I got a text this morning, and I think I need to go home and be a mom right now. So as much as I don’t want to leave — and I don’t want to leave our journey — I got to be a parent.”
While he understood her decision, Gerry said he was “disappointed” that she was leaving, adding, “I was thrilled that we had a conversation like we did, but there’s a moral compass with both share and sometimes the right thing to do is the hardest.”
After sharing a goodbye kiss with Joan, Gerry broke down in tears on a bench outside the mansion.
The Golden Bachelor airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.
