I know Warren wasn’t perfect, but neither were the other candidates, and she seemed willing to learn from her mistakes. She showed measured kindness and justified rage in her town halls and on the debate stage. She wasn’t promising a revolution the way Sanders was, but in my mind, voting for a competent, radical woman was the revolution. To my husband, though, her qualifications were not enough, and most voters seemed to agree.

My husband and I started dating just before the 2012 election. After the results of that election came in, he texted me that yes, it was great that we got four more years of Barack Obama, but what he’d really be excited for was to vote for President Warren one day. I reminded him of this recently, and he maintains that he would’ve liked to see her in the White House. But when we had the chance to choose, I saw him vote for strategy over idealism, a decision I suspect many felt forced to make after Warren went from front-runner to underdog. After a few tearful conversations in the week leading up to Super Tuesday, I could not make my husband understand what seemed so monumental to me about Warren’s campaign. To him, what was important was avoiding a contested convention, and he told me he saw his vote for Sanders as one against Biden, the more moderate establishment candidate. “And Bernie is one of the good guys,” he said. “But he doesn’t get as much done as Liz,” I replied weakly.

Read: America punished Elizabeth Warren for her competence

After we voted, I told him I was upset that the Democratic Party had not prioritized a woman and/or a person of color, and that he didn’t support a woman with a real shot at the nomination—a candidate he loved— when it mattered. He was understandably defensive. I wanted him to say he regretted his vote, and all he could truthfully say he regretted was that the country had made his choice for him long before he cast his ballot. I felt frustrated with him for giving up on the candidate we both loved before it was over, and frustrated with myself because trying to persuade him to vote for a female candidate made me feel at times as if I were asking him to use his vote for sympathy rather than strategy. I just wish voting for a progressive woman didn’t feel like a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so rare that it would cause me to silently fume at my own husband for making a different decision.

The heartbreak of watching Warren be punished for her ambition was familiar to me after the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton had suffered similar scrutiny. What is unfamiliar is the loneliness I feel in my grief, something I haven’t been able to share with the person closest to me, because of the different choices we made this time. Instead, I’m buoyed by group texts with my female friends who know how it feels to need the space and time to grieve the four coming years in which a woman will not be president. I only hope that the vote I just cast is not the rare chance it seemed, and that whoever the first progressive woman president is, my husband and I can vote for her together.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.