For Joan Vassos, University of Maryland graduate and star of ABC’s “The Golden Bachelorette,” the chance of finding a forever love is dwindling down week by week.
In the most recent episode of the reality TV series, Vassos accompanied four men to hometown dates, meeting their family, friends and loved ones, before narrowing it down to the final three.
Part one of the series’ finale begins tonight as Vassos heads to Tahiti with the three remaining men: Chock Chapple, a business executive from Wichita, Kansas; Guy Gansert an ER doctor from Reno, Nevada; and Pascal Ibgui, a salon owner from Chicago.
Vassos, 61, who lost her husband to cancer after 32 years of marriage, is a mother of four, a grandmother of two and lives in Montgomery County.
Earlier this month, The Sun interviewed Vassos about how the season is going and if she has any advice on dating.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What’s the Maryland dating scene like for women of a certain age?
A: I’m not sure if it’s different in Maryland versus anywhere else. Dating at this age is just plain hard. … The pool of people is small, and the pool of people that are a good match for you is really small. So like confining it to a state, because geographically that’s easier, is very, very limiting.
After my husband had been gone for about two years, I thought, I’m not getting any younger, I’m getting older. I really want somebody in my life, and so, I need to put myself out there. And I said to a friend: “Do you know anybody? And everybody’s like, ‘Oh no, I don’t know anybody that you’d like.’ Or ‘I don’t know very many single people.’”
I tried a dating app — that was like having a job. You had to make sure you were on it all the time, and responding and flirting via text. Then you would meet the person and they weren’t at all who you thought they were.
I talk to people all over the place, and they’re all saying the same thing, that it’s really hard to meet somebody, including all the women that were on “The Golden Bachelor” with me. We were all there for a reason.
Yeah, it would have been easy out in the world — we wouldn’t have dated on national TV. But we did it because it’s hard to find somebody. It’s almost like fortune favors the bold. So you have to do something very bold to put yourself out there.
What would be the perfect date in Maryland? What would you do?
You know, I love Annapolis. It has the water element, and I have some family there, so it feels very homey to me. I love the little restaurants. I love going and picking crabs. So if it was with somebody that wasn’t from this area, that would be a really fun thing to do — teach somebody how to eat crabs. I mean, Old Bay is like our favorite spice in the world, here in Maryland. So I think I want to show them something culturally about Maryland, and Annapolis is the capital, and it’s just a lovely town.
Have you been surprised at how emotional the men seem to be?
It’s probably the biggest thing because it started on night one. It wasn’t like they slowly started revealing things. I mean, they jumped in. It was totally unexpected, not just by me, but by the production. I think that we were planning on this being a harder lift, getting them to open up and be emotional and reveal things about themselves that eventually I need to know. I mean, when you’re picking somebody, you need to know all.
We thought it was going to be much harder, at least I did, pulling these stories out from them, and that wasn’t true at all. I think they felt so safe with this group of men who had gone through similar things, they just opened up right away. They were wonderful.
What kind of dating advice would you say is kind of true no matter your age?
When I was growing up, I would go for guys that really weren’t going to eventually be good matches for me, but they were fun, they were good-looking, or you know, the life of the party, or something that attracted me to them. And I had that during the season also. People that I was very attracted to, but in my mind, I knew that maybe they weren’t going to give me the life that I wanted in the end.
And so I think that is true, especially when you’re younger, when you have more of a tendency to pick the person that is the most fun, or that you’re most attracted to or there’s something about them, but you need to look deeper and make sure they’re going to give you what you want in the long run.
Other than sending the guys home, what’s been the most difficult part?
Sending the guys home? There’s just almost no other answer to that. Sending the guys home is torture. Ceremonies are awful because they have been so open and so revealing of themselves that even if I don’t feel like I have a love connection with them, they are really friends now. You bond in such a different way than you do in normal life, because you share these big stories right away.
But I would think the other thing was that it is so emotional. You’re discovering things inside of yourself that you didn’t know were there. And I had kind of an emotional journey that I had to go through, that I was totally unaware that I hadn’t done yet. I thought I was totally ready. And I got three episodes into this, and I was all of a sudden, like, how am I going to do this? I still have John in my heart, and how am I going to let somebody else in? And it took me a little time to get through that.
“The Golden Bachelorette” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on ABC.
