The winners of the first season of “The Golden Bachelor” are re-hashing their breakup.
Turner announced, in a Dec. 11 interview with People, that he’d been diagnosed with an incurable form of bone marrow cancer called Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia. In an interview with People, Turner said his diagnosis played a part in his breakup with Nist.
In her own interview with People, Nist suggested that her ex-husband’s cancer diagnosis didn’t significantly impact their relationship.
“If that was something on his part, maybe, I don’t know. But no, that didn’t factor into ending the relationship,” the 71-year-old said.
When Nist learned that her new husband had cancer in March 2024, she was “extremely upset.”
“He told me though, that it was the type of cancer that he would most likely outlive,” she added.
According to the Mayo Clinic, Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia grows slowly and “may not cause symptoms for years.”
Calling Turner “a very positive person,” Nist said she’s confident that he will “do the best that he can to make this a positive experience.”
“And I have every faith that is going to work out that way, that it’s going to be the type of cancer that will not affect his life and that he’ll live to be a very healthy old age,” she said.
Read on to find out what else Nist said in response to Turner’s revelation — and where their opinions diverge about why their relationship ended.
Why did Turner and Nist break up?
The exes first met while filming “The Golden Bachelor.” In the season finale of the ABC dating series, Nist and Turner got engaged. They went on to get married on live TV in January 2024.
Three months later, in April 2024, they announced their divorce on Good Morning America.
“Theresa and I have had a number of heart-to-heart conversations, and we’ve looked closely at our situation, our living situation, so forth and — and we’ve kind of come to the conclusion mutually that it’s probably time for us to — dissolve our marriage,” Turner said in the interview with ABC News.
Nist posted her own response three days later, sharing an Instagram post and lengthy caption. She said, in part, “Sometimes things don’t go the way you planned and that’s okay.”
According to Turner, cancer played a role in the breakup. The diagnosis came, he said, as the couple was figuring out how to “make (their) life work,” he told People.
Turner lives in Indiana and Nist lives in New Jersey. He said he decided not to uproot his life.
“I wanted my life to continue on as normal as possible, and that led me to believing that as normal as possible more meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two son-in-laws, my granddaughters,” he said. “And the importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”
Nist, meanwhile, told People there were several factors to the dissolution of her marriage with Turner, but that cancer wasn’t among them — “at least not for me,” she said.
“Part of it was the distance, but that wasn’t the only part. That’s really all I will say,” she said.
Nist said they had plans to move to South Carolina and had looked at homes online, but noted that Turner “kind of changed his mind” once he returned home after the wedding.
“He said, ‘No, let’s do it six weeks here and six weeks there.’ And I didn’t want to do that. I really wanted a home together. I wanted the joy of being in a home together and designing a home together. I really thought that was going to be phenomenal. I was looking forward to that so much,” she said.
Elsewhere, she has implied there was more to the breakup than distance or cancer, but rather personality. Nist told People that the show’s timeline had an impact on their post-show romance.
The four-week dating experiment is a “very short span of time to get to know someone, and it’s a very accelerated pace,” she said.
“During that four weeks, it’s not that you’re with that person every day anyway. There were only certain times that I was with him one-on-one,” she said.
In November 2024, Nist made cryptic remarks on the podcast “Almost Famous.”
“You really can’t know somebody in four weeks. I’ll just say that,” she said.