Pete Buttigieg suspended his 2020 campaign this week after a historic run as America’s first openly gay presidential candidate. It was a sad moment for his supporters (though, as my mother notes, 38-year-old Buttigieg has a bright future ahead of him). But as Buttigieg endorses Joe Biden and returns to South Bend, the member of Team Buttigieg I’ll personally miss the most is his loving, drama-teaching, self-identified “rescue doggo dad” husband, Chasten.

Chasten was—and is—an ideal campaign spouse and surrogate. Unlike some political wives who give off distinct captive vibes (blink once if you did not come to this steak fry of your own volition!), Chasten has a way of speaking reverentially about his husband, while still maintaining his own sparkling personality and presence. He isn’t just a sidekick, but someone with his own story to tell: one of a young man who left home and was temporarily homeless after coming out at 18, who survived sexual assault by a friend of a friend at around the same time, and who felt saved by the safe space of high school theater and came full circle when he later became a theater teacher himself.

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Chasten’s gifts of empathy and connection were on full display when he tearfully introduced Pete—who he sometimes calls “Peter” in interviews—at Sunday’s South Bend rally, where Buttigieg dropped out of the race.

“About a year and a half ago, my husband came home from work and told me—well, he asked me—what do you think about running for president? And I laughed, not at him, but at life. Because”—here, Chasten choked up, and was urged on with thunderous applause—“life gave me some interesting experiences on my way to find Pete. After falling in love with Pete, Pete got me to believe in myself again. I told Pete to run because I knew there were other kids sitting out there in this country who needed to believe in themselves, too.”

In telling the couple’s millennial love story—they met on Hinge, natch, and bonded over Pete’s go-to bar snack, scotch eggs—Chasten gave the caustic, divisive 2020 campaign something it sorely needed: a human side. How tender and Notebook-y that Chasten has described Pete as an accomplished Rhodes Scholar and veteran with “this beautiful home on the river in South Bend that he’s restoring.” To the critiques (and the SNL parody) accusing Buttigieg of being stiff and robotic, Buttigieg told The Washington Post this week: “Anybody who knows me knows I would not marry a robot. I fell in love with Pete because he made me feel so important....Not only did he make me believe in love again but he really helped me see my importance and my worth. That’s not robotic. It’s deeply loving.”

Chasten has a Michelle Obama–esque way of “going high.” When Rush Limbaugh made on-brand homophobic comments about him and Pete, saying that America doesn’t want to see a “gay guy kissing his husband” at a debate, he deftly likened Limbaugh to the high school bullies who picked on him growing up in Traverse City, Michigan. I “dealt with a multitude of Rush Limbaughs when I was walking through the hallways,” he told ABC News, reducing the bloviating talk radio host to just another one of them.

It’s a skill that would have proven valuable in the White House, where Chasten says he would have made arts education—and not just for “white kids and the rich suburbs”—one of his First Gentleman causes. Here is a man basically crying out to oversee the most magical, fun-filled Easter Egg Roll of all time! For all we know, he may still get that chance one day. For now, there is some consolation in knowing that Chasten, an avowed Target super-fan, can at least attempt to re-enter normal life.

“Target is a happy place,” he told The Post on the eve of Pete’s exit from the race. “I want to turn the world off and just, like, walk down the candle aisle.” May Chasten now be free to stop and smell the Warm Sugar Vanilla.