Joan Vassos and Chock Chapple are still going strong one year after getting engaged on The Golden Bachelorette — but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel a little pressure when it comes to expectations from Bachelor Nation.
“I do feel that way — if something happened with us, which nothing is going to happen, but if something did that, it would be hard on the Golden franchise,” Joan, 61, told Us Weekly exclusively during a joint interview with Chock, also 61, pegged to their partnership with Inspire. “I’m not sure if I ever said this to anybody, but I felt a lot of pressure to be successful [as the Golden Bachelorette] because Gerry and Theresa had just broken up right before I started filming, like, within months. And I felt a lot of pressure that if I wasn’t successful, if I didn’t find somebody, that it would be the end of it. I felt super responsible. I got lucky.”
Joan and Chock got engaged on season 1 of The Golden Bachelorette, which aired in fall 2024. From the beginning, Joan was vocal about how she didn’t want to leave her kids and grandkids in Maryland. Chock, for his part, still resides in Kansas.
“Even though we live apart, we have spent a very good amount of time together,” Chock told Us. “And over the next two to three weeks, we’ll be together a lot [in New York City for the holidays]. We’re still learning [about each other]. In all honesty, you still learn about someone a year later, and it’s been very enjoyable.”
Chock added that Joan makes her life “much better” for a lot of reasons, including her organization, which is needed as they plan their meet-ups and trips.
“We figure it out month to month,” she said. “It’s harder because we’re a lot busier than we thought we were going to be, but we’ve had a lot of fun doing it. The way that it has unraveled has been really fun.”
As far as that engagement ring — which sparked split rumors when Joan wasn’t wearing it earlier this year — they tell Us that they still don’t have plans to tie the knot.
“We’ll get married, but right now, we’re busy. I couldn’t plan a wedding right now if my life depended on it,” Joan said. “It would have to elope or go to city hall. I have a son who got married last summer. I have a son who’s getting married this summer. There may be babies on the way — life is so busy.”
Chock insisted that the duo will wed “when the time is right.”
“We want to. … It’s just not a priority with everything we have going on right now,” he said.
“We’re together,” Joan added. “I don’t think it’ll change the way we are very much, to be honest.”
The aforementioned breakup speculation, which was fueled by Joan not mentioning Chock by name in her Thanksgiving gratitude post, doesn’t really bother them.
“The good thing for us in our internal relationship is I’m OK. That didn’t bother me at all. I kind of thought it was funny,” Chock said. “it is about family, and so I was good with it.”
In addition to spending time together in New York City for the holidays, Joan and Chock teamed up to shoot an ad for Inspire, four years after Chock received the Inspire implant in 2021 following years of struggling with sleep apnea.
“I was suffering from sleep apnea, and I’ve successfully had the implant put in, you have so much more energy when you use Inspire sleep therapy,” Chock — who showed off his Inspire Sleep Remote, a handheld device to turn the implant on/off, adjust stimulation strength and more, at the Us Weekly office — said. “It just really changes your life. And as you get older — a lot of us don’t sleep eight hours a day — but you get a good six to seven hours. You don’t get interrupted sleep.”
Joan, for her part, is grateful too, noting that Chock didn’t have his remote during the first night that they spent together after The Bachelorette.
“We fall asleep, and he snores the whole night. I didn’t sleep [at all], and I had never experienced this before,” Joan recalled. “I actually had left during the night to go back to my room. He explains to me in the morning that he didn’t have his remote control and that he has sleep apnea but it’s going to be fine because [he has] this Inspire implant. I had never even heard of it, and he told me all about it, and the next night, no snoring at all. I know that people really deal with this in their marriages.”
For more from Joan and Chock, watch the video above.
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