All men must fall in love—The Top 12 Couples on Game of Thrones

3. Daenerys and Khal Drogo

This romance shouldn’t work. In season 1, Daenerys is bartered to Khal Drogo like a rug or a horse in exchange for his army of Dothraki screamers. The second time they meet is at their wedding. Due to the language barrier, they’re not able to speak intelligibly to each other until well after after the wedding night. And yet, somehow, they develop a connection. They start to communicate around the time Dany makes her wishes in the bedroom known, and before long they kind of look like a cute couple, with him worried about wine merchants trying to assassinate her and her trying to teach him the English word for “throne.”

But like many romances on this show, it didn’t last. Drogo succumbed to an infected cut, and Daenerys ended up suffocating him to death rather than let him endure a catatonic existence she knew he would have hated.

We don’t know how their relationship would have evolved had Drogo lived. Would Daenerys have been able to break out on her own and lead her armies? Would she have crusaded against slavery while married to a man who eagerly trafficked in it? We can’t be sure. But while it lasted, this relationship was a moving portrayal of passion in the unlikeliest of places.