Prior to making her debut as the first-ever Golden Bachelorette, Joan Vassos decided on one non-negotiable for Fantasy Suites week: no sex with any of her suitors.
“I put a lot of thought into it actually before the season started, just because I felt uncomfortable with having a physical relationship with more than one person,” Joan told Business Insider.
“The Golden Bachelorette,” which premiered in September, is ABC’s newest addition to its sprawling and popular “Bachelor” franchise, itself a spinoff of the wildly successful first season of “The Golden Bachelor,” which focused on one man and a handful of women in their golden years looking for love.
Bachelor Nation was introduced to Joan on season one of “The Golden Bachelor” starring Gerry Turner, but she left the show after three episodes to be with her daughter, who was experiencing postpartum depression back at home.
In her second attempt to find love, Joan forms deep connections with three contestants: Chock, an insurance executive; Guy, an emergency room doctor; and Pascal, a salon owner.
On Wednesday night’s episode, Joan and the men head to Tahiti for overnight dates. In a departure from the usual Fantasy Suites experience, the Golden Bachelorette reveals that she’s not going to be physically intimate with any of the contestants. Instead, she wants to use the time to discuss intimate things off-camera.
Joan told Business Insider that she’s aware that Fantasy Suites are a significant part of this stage of the process, but she wanted her experience to be different.
“I kind of made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to do it,” she told BI of her choice not to be physically intimate with anyone. “I needed to do this the way that made me feel most comfortable.”
Joan said that by doing so, she had more time to get to know the men better.
“And by taking it off the table, it kind of took the pressure off of me, and maybe even the guys,” she said.
There’s another reason she didn’t want to have sex with the contestants.
“I also thought if I ended up with somebody, I didn’t want that to be a part of the relationship that was a contentious part,” she said. “Because if the person I possibly end up with would imagine that I had had a physical relationship with somebody else so recently, I could picture that would be a problem.”
Joan shares similar comments during the episode. “The person that I end up with at the end of this journey has to be my highest priority, because I will spend the rest of my life with that person,” she says. “So if I hold back with everybody until I find that person, it’s the right thing to do.”
New episodes of “The Golden Bachelorette” premiere on Wednesdays on ABC and stream the next day on Hulu.
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