All Men Must Fall in Love: Top 23 couples from Game of Thrones

17. Tyrion Lannister and Sansa Stark

In Westeros, sometimes characters find themselves having to marry not out of love, but duty, in order the better the position of their house. That’s especially true of the women in this world, who generally have less choice in their mates than the men.

Sansa Stark learned first-hand how cruel and capricious this system can be. Throughout the course of the series, she was betrothed to one violent psychopath (Joffrey Baratheon) before eventually marrying another (Ramsey Bolton), although in between she at least had one husband who wasn’t aggressively terrible towards her: Tyrion Lannister.

Like so many other noble-born Westerosi, Tyrion and Sansa married not because they loved each other, but because they were ordered to: in Tyrion’s case by his family and in Sansa’s case by her captors…who also happened to be Tyrion’s family. So this “relationship” never really had much of a chance; the circumstances were too weird.

That said, the pair of them got on alright, and even seemed to be becoming friends toward the end of the third season…and then the Lannisters helped murder Sansa’s entire family at the Red Wedding, effectively killing any chance of genuine companionship. It’s a bad system, this system.

The marriage ends in catastrophe, with Sansa fleeing King’s Landing while Tyrion takes the fall for the poisoning of Joffrey Baratheon. When Tyrion and Sansa reunite much later in the series, they’re on much more on an equal footing, although I wouldn’t hold out hope of a rekindling of what we could extremely charitably call their “romance.”