Joan Vassos, 61, stars in ABC’s new series “The Golden Bachelorette.” Watch the season finale later this month to see which of 24 bachelors the Rockville, Maryland grandmother chooses. “I want to meet a man who has the same feelings about family and the same values that I have,” Vassos said. Photo courtesy of ABC

• Share

PRINT

Of all the talented contestants who viewers faithfully followed on season one of ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor,” producers chose Rockville, Maryland’s own Joan Vassos to be the lead in the first season of “The Golden Bachelorette.”

The show is another spinoff of “The Bachelor,” a reality TV program that premiered in 2002. The franchise produces romance and relationship shows that offer unmarried contestants a chance to find love in front of millions of TV viewers.

Vassos, a 61-year-old school administrator and grandmother, lost her husband of 32 years to pancreatic cancer, and first sought love on “The Golden Bachelor” last year. She had to leave that show early when her daughter had complications from giving birth (both daughter and grandchild are fine).

Now, she gets to make the hard decisions about which eligible bachelors get to stay in the running and which go home. ABC will reveal her final choice in the season finale on November 13.

Vassos started off with 24 prospective fiancés, ages 57 to 69, including a retired UN agency director, an ER doctor, a retired Navy captain, a salon owner, and a fire department chief.

Winnowing down the field of suitors takes place at “rose ceremonies,” in which she hands out roses only to the men who will stay on the show.

“The rose ceremonies are so painful, and you don’t want [to hurt] these lovely men who have been so open and vulnerable, and who are maybe not love connections but are your friends,” Vassos said.

Forming fast relationships

In part, these heart-wrenching decisions are a function of how rapidly things move on the show.

“You create these connections with the men really, really quickly because they share things that have happened in their lives that are life-changing events, and you don’t normally get those conversations early on in a relationship,” she said.

In each episode, Vassos faces the challenge of choosing who she imagines spending her future with and doing so on national television, surrounded by a TV crew.

How did she stay in touch with her feelings and listen to her heart’s desire while all that was happening?

“That was really hard,” Vassos said. “Your interactions are brief, and you need to be very revealing, and you need to show who you are right off the bat.

“There’s so much to process, and then you have to kind of weave in your emotions with [what they are saying] to see if you’re a good fit,” Vassos added.

As she developed feelings for the men, she had to get used to the idea of a new life partner.

“That in itself was scary because I hadn’t done that since [my husband] John passed away, so even allowing myself to have feelings that I hadn’t had before was hard.”

In episode three, she grappled with whether she was as ready to remarry as she had thought — a topic many of her suitors also had to address for themselves.

“I thought, how can I do this? I still love John,” Vassos said. “So, I met with the show psychiatrist, who is available to us at all times.”

Doing so helped her have a breakthrough. “They said…you don’t have to let go of John to hold on to this person. You can hold on to both of them.” Vassos said. “It made me so much happier…and I finally got this freedom.”

Long-distance future

The only bachelor who lived relatively close to Vassos was Pablo, a 63-year-old Retired United Nations agency director from Cambridge, Maryland, almost two hours from her home. He left the show in the first episode.

Since the remaining men are from across the United States, how would Vassos, who was born in Olney and works at the Landon School in Bethesda, and her prospective future husband make things work?

“I’m never leaving Maryland. I said that from the very beginning, that my family is the most important thing to me,” said Vassos, citing her commitments to her mom, mother-in-law, four children and three grandchildren.

“But I also want to meet a man who has the same feelings about family and the same values that I have.” So she wouldn’t ask him to leave his family, just as she wouldn’t leave hers.

Instead, she pictures them living for weeks or months at one another’s homes, and possibly having a shared location where they meet.

That is good news for her family, including her mother, Mary De Kramer, who lives at a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland.

De Kramer celebrated her daughter’s search for love by dressing up entirely in gold to attend a viewing party. There, her friends cheered on her daughter and assessed the husband-worthiness of each prospective mate.

An inspiration for others

Other older adults in the area also follow Vassos’ journey and share her vision for finding love after loss.

Rockville viewer and widow Barbara Isard-Stone, 73, thinks the men on the show are similar to those she has met.

“My dating experience is that there’s no macho act going on…We don’t have the time for any frenzied nonsense” late in life.

“The men on the show are seasoned enough to know that if they just act like strong men, they’re not going anywhere,” Isard-Stone said. “They have to show their sensitive side…their vulnerability, which is appealing, and I think they know it’s appealing.”

While the glamorous clothes and activities on the show don’t reflect the kind of dates most older adults are likely to go on, Isard-Stone said, “these people still have their inner worlds even if they’re on a Hollywood production.”

And besides, she predicts that when it’s all over, “they’re going to go back to their laundry and Lean Cuisine.”

What she finds most appealing about Vassos is how she listens to the bachelors. “Joan shows a lot of compassion; the men respond to it,” Isard-Stone said.

Adriana Glenn is a 58-year-old nursing professor in Northern Virginia who, like Vassos, lost her husband and has been dating in the DMV. She admired Vassos for leaving “The Golden Bachelor” last year to support her daughter.

At the same time, Glenn would have liked to see a Golden Bachelorette who was somewhat more outside mainstream depictions of beauty.

“Any of the other contestants from the first show would have also been appealing” and could have represented people who don’t necessarily meet those traditional standards the way Vassos does, Glenn said.

Like Vassos, Glenn hopes to meet “someone I can confide my secrets with, and I can share my dreams and hopes — because we still have them.”

She and millions of others who await Vassos’ choice of a mate in the season finale can tune in to learn how well each finalist fares and which one finally wins her heart.

After that, those looking to catch an in-person glimpse of the couple should keep an eye out for them when the show wraps. Perhaps the pair will show up at a DMV date night near you.