Grief & The Golden Bachelor
I am usually not a fan of the Bachelor Franchise’s series including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette and Bachelor In Paradise but the inaugural season of the seniors only Golden Bachelor spin off had me intrigued. I found the lead, Gerry Turner, to be charming and his 22 suitors elegant and lovely.
But what I specifically wish to address is the recent “exposure” of Gerry Turner as being “not so golden” due, in part, to a relationship he began just a month after his wife died which he and/or the show seemingly did not disclose to the viewing audience.
As is not uncommon with this franchise, exes of participants of these shows come out to set the record straight about a past relationship with a participant. For whatever various reasons they decide to share their stories of the “real” person they had a relationship or alleged relationship with that did not work out. Their confessions rarely paint their exes in a good light. They are also very one sided.
One day before Gerry Turner’s finale aired on ABC, his ex partner’s niece came out with some rather unflattering news about Gerry and her aunt “Carolyn”. According to this niece, Gerry and “Carolyn” had an almost 3 year relationship, part of which they spent living together in Gerry’s home. Evidently that relationship did not end well. That doesn’t surprise me since it began only 1 month after Gerry’s wife of 40+ years died unexpectedly.
As a grief support facilitator for over 30 years, I have pretty much heard and seen it all regarding grief and how people cope, don’t cope with and react to it. The death of a loved one can make for strange bedfellows — sometimes literally — especially in the case of the loss of a spouse or other partner.
I can’t begin to count the times a newly bereaved widow or widower has attended my grief support sessions professing their undying forever love for their spouse/partner tearfully and emphatically stating they will never even date, much less love again. Time and time again these grievers have a new love interest or are even cohabitating with or married to someone within 6–9 months. Most often I have found widowers are more prone to do so.
It’s never a good idea to enter a new relationship when someone is wounded, especially immediately following the loss of a close loved one. Why? Because when we grieve deeply there’s no room for anything else in our lives. It changes who we usually are. Deep grief is a full time job if we deal with it fully which most people do not do. Most of us tend to move away from pain and choose to deal or not deal with the pain in various ways. For widowers and widowers that often includes a new relationship.
Those who have lost their spouses tend to feel their lives are over or no one could or would ever love them again. If and when someone shows a romantic interest in them it can be exciting and hopeful and they can look before they leap. Oftentimes they enter these relationships to fill the hole their spouses used to fill, their loneliness driving them to settle for a subpar or mismatched relationship they would never enter into if they weren’t in such an emotionally compromised position—if they weren’t so fragile. In other words, they often come into a relationship needy.They come to these relationships broken, looking for someone to “fix” them and their situation. What they don’t realize is that at some point they won’t need to be fixed anymore and therefore won’t need that person anymore either. They also likely won’t have truly experienced their grief process fully as they would have if they hadn’t entered into and focused on the complexities of a new relationship. I firmly believe Mr. Turner was definitely in a broken and needy place after unexpectedly losing his wife of 40+ years. He was lost. He had no hope. He needed to fill that gaping hole in his life and heart. Quickly. He looked for happiness where he could find it and unfortunately that was in a relationship that happened much, much too quickly. Does that make The Golden Bachelor “not so golden”? In my opinion the answer to that question is “no”. It just makes him human.Jackie Deems copyright 2023P.S. I sincerely wish Mr. Turner and Theresa Nist (the woman he proposed to in the finale of The Golden Bachelor) a wonderful, long life together filled with love and happiness and joy.