SHANGHAI, Aug 12 -- A 17-YEAR-OLD boy has been married 10 times, each lasting from hours to a year.

It's easy for him to marry and divorce. He just clicks the mouse.

Increasingly, online games boast a "cyber-marriage" function, and marriage games are popular with millions of Chinese teenagers.

When he was just 14, Zhao Mingliang learned to play an online dancing game, in which two players get married and compete with other players as a team. In the three years since then, he has had a dozen cyber-wives, aged from 13 to 22. All are good-lookers.

"We got to know each other in the game, and used video chat tools to communicate. I would marry them if they were pretty," Zhao said.

Zhao felt it was his responsibility to buy "furniture" and "clothes" to simulate family life. But he had to change his parent's real money into virtual coins in order to play.

However, one of his virtual wives disappeared just after he bought her a suit of "gorgeous" clothes.

"I was extremely angry, I felt cheated," Zhao said. Finally, his parents had enough. They sent Zhao to Beijing Internet Addiction Treatment Center because he often fought and quarreled with them and stole their money to spend on his cyber-wives.

All Zhao's love affairs happened on the Internet. But Li Pu, also aged 17, is luckier. His third virtual wife became his real girlfriend.

Li Pu has been playing online games for two years. He said it's easy to get married in the games. To become husband and wife you just "register" in an appointed room.

He divorced his first two wives because they turned out to be "incompatible," but claimed he had found true love the third time. The young couple live 80 kilometers from each other but have met three times. Li said he is confident about their relationship, but also worries that his girlfriend will dump him some day.

"It's easy to fall in love with someone online, but I don't want to be just a brief flash in her life," he said.

Li said he has been dreaming of a bright future with his girlfriend and they had discussed the possibility of going to the same university. But his psychological consultant Wei Xuhong said his young client had dropped out of school because of his Internet addiction.

"He didn't do anything except surf the Internet, talking to his cyber-wives and playing games with them," Wei said.

His mother sent him from Wuhan, Hubei Province, to the treatment center in Beijing.

Tao Ran, director of the treatment center, said there are 15.4 million young Netizens in China, and 2 million of them are addicts. A survey carried out by the center found 30 percent of the addicts have dallied in cyber-marriage.