Hunan First Normal University senior Hu Xiaoyu and his bride Liu Qinghua take to married life on a cycle at the university athletics track in June 2013. Wen Hai / For China Daily

Shen Ying, a senior marriage expert at Jiayuan.com, a dating website in China, says some undergraduates who marry while at college do not realize the difficulty of making a living and running a family until they graduate.

"Life is not easy, especially when you first enter society as a fresh graduate," Shen says. "Couples who marry at university may have disputes over economic issues if they are not financially prepared."

The problems may not end there. University couples who marry face a wide range of other challenges, from setting a common goal for life to how to understand and tolerate each other.

This calls for young couples to address the situation with some skill and wisdom, according to Zhou.

"But young undergraduates are immature and lack enough experience to handle such issues, which may lead to a marriage crisis or even divorce," she says.

A Chongqing resident who asks to be identified by her surname, Xiao, says her university marriage failed for this reason. The 28-year-old married a man two years older than her in 2009, when she was a junior student at a university in Chongqing.

"He was a cousin of my roommate at the university," Xiao says. "He treated me well and cared for me a lot. I was moved, and agreed to marry him."

But the marriage lasted for just six months. At the beginning of the fourth year at university, the woman ended the unhappy union, saying it resulted from pressure imposed by her husband.

"He would make repeated telephone calls to me when I hung out with friends to ensure that I was not with a man. We quarreled a lot over this," Xiao says, adding that her former husband had not behaved like this before they married.

Because of her experience, Xiao has a negative view of undergraduates marrying while at college, saying: "As undergraduates, they are too young to understand marriage."

For a stable and happy marriage, Jiayuan.com's Shen suggests that undergraduates discuss every aspect with their partners before marrying.

"There are so many decisions to make together, like choosing a city to settle down in, figuring out the financial resources and way of spending money," she says.