What We Can Learn From the Golden Bachelor’s Lightning-Quick Divorce

Well, it’s official. True love is dead. The Golden Bachelor, Gerry Turner, and his Golden Bride, Theresa Nist, are divorcing after three months of made-for-TV marriage.

Gerry swept the American television-watching world by force this fall, a man on a mission to prove that senior citizens like him could play the sport of young men: finding love on national network TV.

The Golden Bachelor, as his series was dubbed, was purer and kinder, hokier and cheesier than most Bachelor and Bachelorette (and certainly Bachelor in Paradise) seasons before it. The contestants seemed genuine and authentic, and gosh darn if they weren’t all there for the right reasons. Squabbles were few and far between, and the losers were (mostly) happy for their fellow contestants as they continued in their respective missions to find love with this Ted Danson–looking, hearing aid–wearing, 72-year-old leading man.

For those who watch television with even a hint of romanticism, the hope was clear: Maybe, just maybe, this septuagenarian could be what the Bachelor was always meant to be. Without the follies of youth, with the wisdom of age, with the purity of heart that comes with seeking a second love after the death of a spouse, maybe this cruel premise of a show—with one man dating many, many women at one time—could actually work for him and his chosen partner. Surely, the elder widower would play a better game than all of those twentysomething medical device salesmen from Peoria turned Instagram models competing for D-list internet fame and influencer marketing deals.

But the reality of this reality series set in when Gerry had whittled his roster of ladies down to just two: Leslie Fhima and Theresa Nist. What ensued on the screen was the ultimate lead-on, where Gerry built Leslie up only to tear her down, promising her a life together and then breaking up with her before millions of American viewers in order to pursue a life with Theresa. Age, as it turned out, didn’t prevent Gerry from messing with Leslie’s heart, and in the show’s final moments, becoming its villain.

Gerry and Theresa wed soon after—again, on national television. “The Golden Wedding,” as it was christened, was an extravagant Disney-made affair with glitz, glamour, and surely a handsome paycheck for the two stars in addition to whatever extra swag they came away with. But the end of the wedding also meant that Gerry and Theresa’s all-too-quick ABC love story had, for all intents and purposes, concluded. The Bachelor process is a speed run of real-life love, where two people date for milliseconds, profess their love for each other in order to get the chance to exclusively be together, and then are saddled with a premature engagement. Most of the Bachelor Nation couples choose to have long engagements before splitting up or marrying. Gerry and Theresa instead made the lucrative decision to tie the knot in January and forgo this interregnum between on-air dating and making a crucial decision about how they wanted to spend the rest of their lives.

They clearly hadn’t even made important choices—namely, where they were going to live once they actually lived together. Theresa of New Jersey and Gerry of Indiana suggested moving to a third location—Charleston, South Carolina—and starting a new life together.

But in the end, neither chose to make that sacrifice for one another. “We looked at homes in South Carolina, we considered New Jersey, and we just looked at homes after home, but we never got to the point where we made that decision,” Theresa said in an interview with ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday announcing the divorce.

So, what can we learn from The Golden Divorce? Not much that we didn’t already know, to be honest. For starters, the laws of relationships don’t bend because your courtship was aired on television. And, as much as the excitement around The Golden Bachelor was built around the idea that people further along in their lives will know what they want, it is abundantly clear that doesn’t necessarily hold true just because you’re of an advanced age.

Second, even if two people love each other—as Gerry and Theresa still claim to do—relationships require work and sacrifice. They mandate that—at least some of the time—you make decisions and put the other person first. Being a TV couple is easy; being a real couple when the cameras shut off is hard.

And last, the American attention span for Gerry and Theresa’s abbreviated love story had ended. A media conglomerate milked their affection for all that it could be. When the TV world was done with Gerry and Theresa, the couple decided it didn’t make romantic, logistical, or business sense to continue to be together.

And for Bachelor viewers who have watched for years, even those of us who hoped things would be different for Gerry and Theresa, who among us can say they are really surprised? We watch the franchise in its many iterations in part for the fairy tale, in part for the mental hoops its stars have to jump through to justify this one-on-many, all-or-nothing, hyperspeed method of finding love. It’s only surprising when it actually works out.