A Midsummer Night's Dream Acts I-III

Through Act III in the play there seems to be lots of shuffling around in relationships and confusion of who loves whom and why they are not together.  As a result it seems that the point of the play thus far is that trying to be with someone you do not love will leave you miserable and alone.  There is a lot of conversation back and forth between Lysander, Hermia, Helena and Demetrius about who really loves who and about why the couples are not together if they love someone else. We can see evidence for the point in that they all end up miserable due to the fact that each of them is with the wrong person.

In the play Lysander is a representative of many things.  He is a respected individual who seeks union with someone and seems to value that union, or at least the idea of it.  Lysander also comes off to be a complicated individual in that he, like many of the other characters, loves someone other than the woman he is with.  The ideas of respect, love and complication are seen not just in Lysander's character but as main themes throughout the play as well.  In the following passage, readers can understand Lysander's sense of respect as well as what we later learn to be a confused attempt at love. 
            Lysander: A good persuation; therefore hear me, Hermia:
                             I have a widow aunt, a dowager
                             Of great revenue, and she hath no child.
                             From Athens is her house remote seven leagues;
                             And she respects me as her only son.
                             There, gentle Hermia, may I marry thee;
                             And to that place the sharp Athenian law
                            Cannot pursue us. If thou lovest me, then
                             Steal forth they father's house to-morrow night;
                             And in the wood, a league without the town
                             (Where I did meet thee once with Helena
                             To do observance to a morn of May)
                             There will I stay for thee
Here we are told by Lysander himself that he is respected.  We know from the beginning of the play that Theseus, too, is a respected individual because of the grandness with which his wedding is being planned.  The love and longing for love aspects are seen in many other characters throughout the play as they continue to make themselves miserable by being with someone they don't love and pining for the one they do.  The complication aspect is almost intertwined with the love aspect of the characters.  They are all dealing with feelings of confusion and complication in that they cannot seem to get their relationships right.  In the passage above, Lysander is asking Hermia to marry him.  This gets complicated for both the characters and the readers later in the play when we find out that Lysander doesn't really love Hermia, but instead loves Helena who loves Demetrius who loves Hermia.  The complication grows as they try to sort things out amongst themselves.