Collection of crumpled Heritage Foundation white papers stuffed into an ill-fitting suit Paul Ryan announced on Wednesday that he will not seek re-election to Congress in 2018. Axios, which broke the news, reported that the speaker has tired of the more frustrating aspects of his position and is ready to spend more time with his family. Coincidentally, these are same reasons I chose to step away from my relationship with my sixth-grade girlfriend shortly after all her friends told me that she planned to dump me very soon, and that honestly, she never liked me that much in the first place.

His tenure as the head of one-third of this unified Republican government has not been nearly as fun as he imagined when he announced its dawn some 18 months ago. His legislative agenda was stymied at just about every turn by an unruly faction of his Tea Party and Tea Party-adjacent colleagues who delivered him a nominal majority and then made it ungovernable. Even if Democrats fail to reclaim the gavel in 2018, Ryan, like his predecessor John Boehner, knows that the task of herding House Republicans is only going to get more difficult, and has ceded responsibility for that goat rodeo to someone else.

Donald Trump’s win in 2016 was a national crisis, but it also presented Paul Ryan, who had declined to endorse the candidate before the election, with a plum opportunity: He could act as a meaningful check on his party’s new leader, at last becoming the Principled Conservative he always imagined himself to be, juicing his odds at leading the party into a post-Trump era in the process. Instead, he chose to see how much of his political agenda he could implement by hitching his wagon to a racist horse. When the president called African countries “shitholes,” and defended murderous neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and repeatedly vowed to obstruct justice, Paul Ryan smiled pleasantly, thought about all the poor people whose health care he had yet to take away, and pretended not to have access to the Internet.

The irony of the speaker’s political career, of course, is that Donald Trump accomplished in a single year what Ryan, over a lifetime of practiced, erudite wonkiness, never could. The tax reform bill he spearheaded remains the least popular piece of legislation in history, and his diligent efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act imploded in progressively spectacular fashion. His fundamental problem was always that his tax-slashing, benefit-eliminating, donor-enriching, poor-people-ignoring worldview has no constituency, and so his meager victories came only when his ideological goals happened to align with the interests of a flag-waving carnival barker who is more popular and more successful than Ryan ever managed to be.

A spokesperson clarified that Ryan will serve out the remainder of his term and “run through the tape”—a charitable metaphor given his record of accomplishments—before retiring in January, at which point he will presumably take a job at a conservative think tank and/or enter the corporate world for which he so vociferously stumped while in office. Really, though, Ryan’s career has been on life support since last year, when Steve Bannon, of all people, described the speaker as “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation." We wish Paul Ryan all the best on his return trip home.