At 58, farmer John is ready to find love again. After spending the past 14 years as a widower, the Farmer Wants a Wife contestant has opened his heart in the hopes of finding a new partner to share his life with.
“The nights start to get very lonely,” John says. “I am in the position where I could afford to travel a little and I would love a partner to do that with.” But finding the woman of his dreams is proving a tough task. No one can live up to the high standards set by John’s wife of 25 years, Janice, who passed away from cancer in 1997.
“If I tried comparing somebody to Janice, I’d probably have nobody,” John tells Woman’s Day. “Jan was faultless.”
Their great love story began at the tender age of 16, when John and his mates decided to crash a very special event. “It was her debutante ball and all us young fellas had just come back from a rodeo and I guess we sort of walked in there a bit uninvited and I just saw this beautiful girl and I said, ‘I am going to try get on to this girl’,” John remembers. “I don’t think her deb partner was very happy, but I kind of cut in after a while and that was it.”
The happy couple married in 1972 and had two sons, Richard, 35 and Brett, 32. “We never had an argument, she was just so easy to get along with,” John says. “I had a once in a lifetime lovely lady in Jan.”
John says he was devastated when Janice was diagnosed with Bowel Cancer. “The doctors couldn’t tell me how bad it was until they operated and when they did, the doctor had to come out and give me the news and he said it has gone too far and there is definitely nothing that can be done….he said she may have six months, but she never even had that long.”
Despite Janice’s grim diagnosis, she remained positive and upbeat, determined to beat the cancer. “She was so positive that she was going to beat it,” John says. “She was so strong, much stronger than all of us with it. We would be in tears and she would never get into tears and she said, ‘I have to be strong for you and the boys’.”
Janice’s last wish was for her devoted husband to find love again and to live a happy and fulfilled life. “She said to me, ‘Don’t be alone the rest of your life. You’ll find somebody to be happy with and these boys will have grandkids one day and they’ll all want to see you happy with somebody.”
In 1997, just four months after she was diagnosed, Janice lost her battle with cancer. “It was very sad – it is something you have to learn to live with,” John says. “But I have the two boys and I see her in the two boys. Brett is wild like me, and Richard is very quiet like his mum.”
But despite his painful past, John’s journey on the Channel 9 hit show has given him a new lease on life and he is positive the woman of his dreams is out there somewhere. “I will eventually find the right one,” he says with a smile. “Something good will come out of this.”
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