Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos had 'angst' about asking for major Fantasy Suites change

"I was afraid they were going to shut the whole thing down."

Bachelor Nation likes to refer to the overnight Fantasy Suite dates as "sex week." For The Golden Bachelorette star Joan Vassos, however, the goal was a sexless week.

Viewers learned last month that Joan asked producers to remove the beds from her Fantasy Suites, so that she and her final men — Pascal, Guy, and Chock — could keep the focus on having important off-camera conversations. "I said, 'I want to do Fantasy Suites, but I don't want to have a bed in there,'" she told The View. "I'm taking that off the table."

As fans saw in tonight's episode, Joan stayed true to her word — but as she reveals to Entertainment Weekly, asking Bachelor producers to make that major change to Fantasy Suites was a nerve-racking experience.

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"It was causing me a lot of angst, because I knew this wasn't going to be popular. It's not going to be what they want," she recalls. "It was probably three weeks into the season, and I was up late with my producer and we were taking a walk. I thought, 'Okay, this is a good time to tell him.' I said, 'I need to talk to you about something.' And I told him that I didn't feel comfortable having that physical relationship with more than one person, so I really want to do Fantasy Suites a different way, and I'm hoping they'll allow that."

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Joan says her biggest fear was that producers "weren't going to budge" on the issue — and that they might even cancel overnight dates altogether. "I was afraid they were going to shut the whole thing down and say, 'We're not changing our format for you.' I was afraid that then I wouldn't have the opportunity to have the conversations without the cameras," she says.

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But her producer deemed the request "reasonable" and agreed to run it by the franchise's executive producers. "He came back and was like, 'Yeah, okay.' They had no problem with it," Joan continues. "They respected that that's how it needed to be for me. They were great about it. But I did have some sleepless nights before I dove into that and said that's what I needed."

Even without the beds, Joan says her Fantasy Suite dates went late into the night, as she and her final men spent hours talking. "I don't think I left the Fantasy Suite until two or three o'clock in the morning with any of the guys," she says. "At the end of the night, it was like, 'Time to go, I'm going to bed. I've got to do this again tomorrow.'"

Unfortunately for Joan, no sex didn't mean no problems: Pascal eliminated himself after deciding that he simply wasn't feeling it for Joan. He'll (presumably) have a chance to explain himself next week at the Men Tell All reunion.

The Golden Bachelorette airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.