Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist won the hearts of reality TV romance lovers last year when he picked her as his bride on “The Golden Bachelor,” only for the couple to break up a few months later.
Show fans naturally had questions about the quick breakup, and Turner now tells People that one of the factors that led to them calling it quits was a cancer diagnosis.
“I think it’s time, also because it probably will clear up a lot of mystery around what happened back in February, March and April,” the Indiana-based Turner said.
Turner told the publication that he was diagnosed with a slow-growing “bone marrow cancer” with a “really long name” right around the time when he and his new bride “were trying very hard to find our lifestyle and where we were going to live and how we were going to make our life work.”
The couple had a whirlwind romance after meeting on the ABC reality show and ended up tying the knot on TV in January just a few months after the show’s finale.
When Turner and Nist announced their split on “Good Morning America” back in April, they didn’t specify a particular reason, but did imply that living in different states was an issue.
“We looked at homes in South Carolina, we considered New Jersey, and we just looked at home after home, but we never got to the point where we made that decision,” Nist said.
Eric McCandless via Getty Images
“Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations … and we’ve come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to dissolve our marriage,” Turner said at the time.
Turner said he found out about the disease around the same time he was starting a life with Nist.
An orthopedic surgeon treating him for a shoulder injury and noticed some unusual blood markers and referred him to an oncologist. He is now working with a hematology-oncology group in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it. So that weighs heavily in every decision I make,” he said regarding the diagnosis. “It was like 10 tons of concrete were just dropped on me. And I was a bit in denial for a while, I didn’t want to admit to it.”
Turner shared the info about his illness with Nist in February before going into additional testing.
“Certainly, it was hard for me,” he said about the conversation with Nist. “But the conversation was brief and I think [she was] a little bit awestruck by the news. So understandable.”
After processing the news, Turner realized he wanted his life to be as normal as possible, “and that led me to believing that as normal as possible more meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two son-in-laws, my granddaughters.”
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But, as a result, he admits that “the importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”
Since Turner didn’t publicly announce his medical findings right away, he said many viewers made “judgments” about the breakup that he says were “unfair.”
“I hope that people understand in retrospect now that that had a huge bearing on my decisions and I think probably Theresa’s as well,” he said, adding that he hopes fans will now “look at things a little bit differently,” and realize that “maybe it wasn’t quite a rash, fast decision that people thought.”