Golden Bachelorette's Joan and Chock on avoiding haters: 'People can be very unkind'

Breaking news, rose lovers: Chock Chapple, the 60-year-old insurance executive from Kansas, is "crazy about" Joan Vassos. So darn crazy, in fact, that he proposed to 61-year-old private school administrator on last night's season finale of The Golden Bachelorette — and she said yes.

The telegenic senior duo are ready to start their second-act love story in earnest, but they're planning on taking their time before planning a wedding. There are important logistics to figure out — she lives in Maryland, he's in Wichita — and as Joan told Entertainment Weekly this summer, there's no hurry. "I don't want to rush into anything. I don't need to! I don't have a biological clock that I'm worried about anymore," she said. "I have a full life. Figuring out how you merge lives is a longer process. If you have the love, then it's worth it."

For now, the couple is just happy that their romance is no longer a secret. Now they can do the fun stuff, like talking to EW about which one of them cheats on the crossword, shopping for a pied-à-terre in New York City, and more.

Chock Chapple and Joan Vassos on 'The Golden Bachelorette' finale.Disney/Gilles Mingasson
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Congratulations! What was the hardest part about keeping the secret from your friends and family?

CHOCK CHAPPLE: Well, after the engagement, we were able to call my kids. So my kids knew. And then after that, you go home — and I'm finally able to sober up because my friends just tried to give me drinks to get me to spill everything. [Laughs] Last night we were able to get past that. Some of your extended family and friends, it was just difficult not to tell 'em you're so happy. You come back and you [want to say], "I've met this great person and we're going to have this great life together," but you can't risk it for the integrity of the show.

JOAN VASSOS: Two of my kids actually were in Tahiti. So all my kids knew, and my mom and my mother-in-law, my brother. We kept it to the immediate family. It's really hard not to tell your friends. They all know you're going on the journey and everybody is so excited for you, and not to be able to tell how it turns out, it was really, really hard. But I had a bunch of friends in the audience just like he did last night [at the finale], and they got to find out kind of when America found out.

Joan and Chock chat with EW about 'The Golden Bachelorette'.ABC
Last night you talked about how you learned a lot about each other during the "happy couple" visits, where you did a lot of cooking and did crosswords. What were some of the things you learned? Like, does one of you cheat at crosswords?

CHOCK: On occasion, I have pulled out the phone. [Laughs] I have on very rare occasions.

JOAN: We do do crosswords together. He does pull out the phone sometimes. Sometimes I am a fan of that. Sometimes I'm like, "No, no, that's cheating. You can't do that."

CHOCK: It's more of an assist than cheating, I must say.

JOAN: I don't think we found out anything huge about each other. I found out he's one of the guys who doesn't snore, and I was very happy. But I did find out he does nap a lot. You find him on the sofa asleep all the time.

CHOCK: I love a good nap.

JOAN: He's actually a really easy person to be with.

Chock meets Joan's family on 'The Golden Bachelorette'.Disney/Gilles Mingasson
Chock, what did you learn about yourself from watching the show back?

CHOCK: I wish the show would've showed more of my personal relationships with the other cast members, and really the compassion that we all had for each other because it was there. But [the show] only has so much time.

You guys live in different parts of the country, and Joan, you've been vocal from the beginning about not wanting to move away from your family in Maryland. What kind of conversations are you having right now about how you'll make this work?

JOAN: We've had a lot of them. Chock has a business in Kansas, but his kids have moved to the East coast, so [he] has family in my direction. I think for this first year at least, we're going to go back and forth between Kansas and Maryland, getting to know each other's friends and family. But then we also have this idea that we both have always wanted to live in New York City, to have place up there that we can go back and forth to. It's an easy trip for Maryland. It's a three-hour train ride. We're actually leaving for New York on tomorrow, and we're going to spend the weekend just enjoying life a little bit, just being a couple. Then on Monday we're meeting with a realtor.

Going public as a couple also means you have to deal with trolls and other people who might not have nice things to say about you and your relationship. What is your strategy for dealing with any feedback that maybe isn't so positive?

CHOCK: The show does educate you. They say, "Even if you're the best person in the world, you're going to have people say negative things." I don't like it. But the best thing to do is just not even read [the comments]. You can't solve hate, you can't solve somebody's frustration. Joan's good because the people will reach out and they've had similar issues, pancreatic cancer, those type of things. She's very good at responding to those people. So if you look, you do run that risk of seeing negative comments. And some of the things people say are just crazy. They're absolutely crazy.

JOAN: People can be very unkind when they're they're not face-to-face with you. And like Chock said, I really want to read the comments, because so many people have reached out to me and talked about maybe having lost a loved one and how my story resonated with them. I really want to have a conversation with those people. If they take the time to message you to say, you've done a good job or you've helped me, I need to respond back to them. But sprinkled in with those messages are the mean ones, and you have to get through those to make sure you get to the ones that you really want to respond to. I don't engage with them, I try to ignore them. But it's kind of human nature — 95 good ones and five bad ones, the five one bad ones are the ones that I remember. So I'm trying to get better about that. And like Chock said, something could be going on in these people's lives and they're just angry, so I just give them a pass.

Chock wears his gold rose boutonnière on 'The Golden Bachelorette' finale.ABC
Chock, where is the gold rose boutonnière right now and where do you intend to keep it?

CHOCK: I have a safe in my office and it's been in there. When I came back, it was in a box and I couldn't show anybody. So it's been in that, and I really wish I would've brought it out here and it would've just been symbolic to me. I have the [real] rose from last night right here, but I still have that gold rose and I'm going to keep it the rest of my life.

Joan, did you get to keep any clothes?

JOAN: No, I haven't yet. I do understand that they're very generous and offer us a few of the outfits, but so far I've been doing enough press that I still need to have the clothes here with the stylists. I think until everything is really settled down, you don't go through that process.

CHOCK: If I can throw something in there, I pulled a special favor. My favorite dress of the whole series was the leather dress. It's stunning. Well, guess who has that leather dress? [Points to himself] I had to call in a big favor to get that. Joan and I are going to donate it to a nonprofit to have it auctioned off. We're going to do that very soon, too. And hopefully it raises a bunch of money. But that dress was just stunning.

Joan is a vision in leather on 'The Golden Bachelorette'.ABC
Chock, Pascal gave an interview where he made some unkind comments about you, which he later apologized for. Have you spoken to him since then?

CHOCK: No, and as I mentioned earlier, I just don't deal with that stuff. I want to be positive in my life. Somebody did tell me that he kind of redacted his statement, and great. We were all brothers, and it was emotional too. I don't know why he did it, and it's not that I don't care, but I just have to look at the positive things in my life.

Joan, we don't know who he's going to be, but what is your advice for the next Golden Bachelor?

JOAN: I asked other Bachelor and Bachelorettes before I came on for their advice. Overall, everybody said be open and vulnerable really early on because it then allows the person that's sitting across for you to do the same thing, and you learn the important stuff really early on. That's the best advice that anybody gave me.

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