Joan Vassos and her fiance Chock Chapple tried hard to keep their engagement under wraps after they made their forever commitment to each other during the Nov. 13 finale The Golden Bachelor.
“The family obviously knows — you can’t keep it from your kids — but not telling your friends, that’s very hard,” Chapple, 60, tells PEOPLE in a joint interview with Vassos, 61. “We did a lot of traveling to the homes of happy couples in California. , so they know what’s going on, but you can’t tell.”
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Vassos thinks it was harder for Chapple to keep their engagement a secret than it was for her.
“I think they see it on your face when you’re really happy,” says the mom of four. “They say, ‘Well, this obviously worked for you.’ You would suspect that I succeeded, but I think it is very difficult for Chock because he was one of the 24 [suitors]so walking around looking so happy all the time, people get suspicious.”
Chapple came up with a creative cover story for those many trips from his home in Wichita, Kansas to Los Angeles to visit Vassos.
“I told them I was an underwear model and I was going to LA for a lot of shoots,” says the security director. “They wanted a guy my size, and I was getting more and more popular.”
Chock Chapple proposed to Joan Vassos in the first season of ‘The Golden Bachelor’.
Disney/Gilles Mingasson
Now that Vassos and Chapple are free to be together in public, “we’re really looking forward to just being a couple in the world and just being normal people living life for at least a few months,” she says. “And then we’ll start thinking about the wedding.”
Chapple will stay in Kansas, and Vassos doesn’t want to leave his home in Maryland, but they plan to find an apartment together in New York where they can be alone.
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“We’ll go back and forth between Kansas and Maryland and New York,” Chapple says. “We will have a permanent place in New York and whenever the opportunity arises, we will be there. Next year we will solve it.”
Vassos plans to travel to Kansas to meet Chapple’s family and will bring loved ones to Maryland for Thanksgiving and Christmas. “But when we want to be alone together, we’ll probably be in New York,” says the private school principal.
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Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos and fiance Chock Chapple.
Disney/Gilles Mingasson
So far, Vassos has found Chapple to be “a really easy person to live with” and “very laid back”.
“I am very amenable to training!” the father of two jokes.
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Chapple says he’s been “thoroughly impressed” by everything he’s discovered about Vassos since filming wrapped.
“Joan said this about me, one of my characteristics is that I’m a fixer,” he says. “She’s also a fixer, and we handle life beautifully as we go through it.”
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The Golden Bachelor now streaming on Hulu.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education