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Joan Vassos accepted a Neil Lane diamond on the Wednesday, November 13, finale of The Golden Bachelorette.
After sending home Guy Gansert early, Joan, 61, got engaged to Chock Chapple.
“From our first date in Disneyland, I thought I saw a future with you and it’s the first time I pictured a future with anybody else in a really long time,” Joan told Chock, 61. “And then tragedy hit your family and your mom passed away and you had to leave. I wanted you to go but I was really worried that you weren’t going to make it back and that’s when I realized that I couldn’t do this journey without you.”
“I waited til this moment in this amazing location to tell you that I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” she continued, as Chock got down on one knee.
Chock, an insurance agent from Wichita, Kansas, was an early front-runner for Joan, scoring the first one-on-one date of the season.
“We started talking and never stopped,” Joan previously gushed in her Us Weekly cover story. “It was so easy — to the point where producers said, ‘Hey, enjoy the atmosphere. You’re just talking amongst yourselves.’”
Joan was previously married to husband John for 32 years. He died in 2021 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The twosome shared four kids: Nick, 34; Erica, 33; Allison, 30; and Luke, 28.
“I’ve had this feeling that I don’t feel as safe as I used to when John was alive,” Joan told Us. “I thought, ‘[Chock’s] a person who would make you feel safe again.’”
Chock Chapple and Joan Vassos Disney/Gilles Mingasson
Chock, for his part, was married to ex-wife Heather for 12 years, filing for divorce in 2012. They share two kids: Taylor, 25, and Tyler, 23. He was engaged to his partner of nine years, Kathy, when she died of brain cancer in 2022. As she referenced in her final speech, Joan and Chock’s happy ending was nearly cut short when he briefly left the show because his mother died.
“I knew in his heart he wanted to come back, but I knew that he could find something at home that didn’t allow him to come back,” she told Us. “And as a really upstanding guy, he would not leave his family that needed him. So I was honestly really, really worried he wasn’t gonna come back. Thank goodness he did.”
The Golden Bachelorette finale continues live on ABC with After the Final Rose. The franchise returns with Grant Ellis’ season of The Bachelor on Monday, January 27.
