In A Midsummer Night's Dream romantic love is a salient, but ultimately subordinate theme. That love, and specifically romantic love leading to marriage, is a subject of the play that cannot be denied. This is a work that ends with the weddings of three couples (the four Athenian youths along with the city's rulers, Theseus and his bride Hippolyta) and the reconciliation of fairyland's married monarchs, Oberon and Titania. As for Shakespeare's ideas about romantic love in this work, they embody much of what has been said about the topic over the ages. Love, according to Helena, is blind, irrational, and oft-times cruel.