Li Yi felt his heart breaking into pieces. The 25-year-old traffic engineering major at Beijing Jiaotong University stared at the text message from his girlfriend, who had just broken up with him. It made his already bittersweet graduation even more painful.

Many students experience great difficulties in their relationship when they graduate from college. Experts say it is a result of their impatience in overcoming love-related problems and a lack of planning in their love life.

Painful parting

Having been together for seven years, Li and his girlfriend always tried to make their relationship work. But their biggest challenge came when Li got a job at a State-owned company, which promised him a Beijing hukou (household registration).

His girlfriend, however, hadn’t found a job offering her such an opportunity, so she decided to return to her hometown in Jiangsu province.

“My chance of getting a Beijing hukou was a burden on our relationship,” Li says. “My girlfriend told me that a hukou means a stable and promising future for me, but without it she has to go her separate way.”

Zhang Danyu also broke up with her boyfriend recently. The 22-year-old accounting student at Shanghai University did so because her boyfriend is going to study abroad for two years.

“I don’t know whether I can bare the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, especially when he is in a different county,” she says.

Besides, she’s afraid that his overseas experience will grant him a different view of the world than her. “If that’s the case, we can no longer communicate smoothly as we did in the past,” she says.

Easy way out

According to Xia Xueluan, professor of sociology at Peking University, students break up because it’s the easiest choice.

“In graduation season, couples often face two problems: They will go to different places, and they will cultivate different world views due to their different social and work experiences,” he says. “Both problems are difficult for students to overcome. Therefore, breaking up is regarded as the easiest option.”

Zhang Jiarui, a relationship expert at Jiayuan.com, believes that students’ tendency to break up in graduation season is also the result of a lack of planning in their love life.

“Most of them rarely think about marriage. Even worse, they don’t yet have an idea of who their ideal spouse is,” she says. “Under these circumstances they show little responsibility toward their college relationship.”

But Lei Wuming, professor of psychology at Wuhan University of Technology, says students should not avoid college relationships just because they may fail. “The purpose of being in a relationship is not merely getting married, but learning to communicate with people of the opposite sex. No matter how their college relationship ends, students will have learned important skills,” he says.