Introduction: One of distress and psychological anomalies, which decreases or fades the love and affection between couples over time, causes emotional and mental problems, and finally leads to emotional or formal divorces, is couple burnout. This study aimed to evaluate the efficiency of relationship enhancement program on reducing couple burnout.

Methods: This study was of the quasi-experimental method with a pretest-posttest design with control group and follow-up. The population of the study consisted of all the married couples with marital problems who were referred to Hamyaran Salamat Ravan institute in Bojnurd city, Iran in spring and summer of 2014, and were ready to participate in the sessions. Based on purposeful and available sampling method, 20 couples who had received the highest scores in couple burnout based on inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study were considered eligible to participate in the sessions; they were assigned to intervention and control groups by random assignment (n = 1 per group). The assessment tool was couple burnout measure (CBM) of Pines (1996), which was completed by subjects in pretest, posttest and follow-up (one month) stages. The dependent variable (relationship enhancement program) was held in eight sessions of 1.5 hours in groups with step-by-step method, with the sequence of one session per week for the intervention group. The control group received no intervention until the end of the experiment. The research data were analyzed through univariate covariance analysis in SPSS 18.

Results: The results of the analysis suggested that, at posttest, the relationship enhancement program significantly reduced couple burnout in the experimental group, and the results were consistent enough up to the follow up stage.

Conclusions: The results of this study indicated that the marital relationship enhancement program was effective in reducing couple burnout and this method of intervention can be used as an effective method for improving marital relationships and for solving marital problems of clients in counseling centers and couple-therapy group sessions.