Keep your marriage from burning out.

Three months after they first began to date, Tim and Lisa knew that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Every area of life seemed in tune, from their mutual love of Robert Frost to their desire to have two children, a dog, and a house in the suburbs to fix up. They eagerly anticipated their wedding day as the first day of the bliss that would come ever after.

The first years were, indeed, exciting. They finished school, landed jobs, and threw themselves into their work. For vacations they traveled abroad, celebrating one memorable anniversary on a river cruise in China. On Valentine's Day, Lisa made Tom, not just a card, but an entire mobile of cards to hang from the ceiling of their apartment. He brought her a dozen red roses.

Gradually, though, the special times became fewer and fewer. They had a son and then a daughter. Tim, wanting to build his career and provide for his growing family, worked long hours and worried about advancement. Lisa found her energy sapped by the constant demands of a baby and a preschooler. Dinner table conversation focused most of the time on discipline, bills, household chores, and whether Tim was rising fast enough in the company. When they finally fell into bed at night, their dreams were not of how to bring pleasure to each other, but of how to keep from coming home the next night to face the pain of their reality.

Tim and Lisa had slipped into what author William Coleman calls marital burnout. While the condition is common in our society today, he believes it does not have to be terminal. He shared some ideas from his new book, Keeping Your Marriage From Burning Out, in an interview to be aired on a Christian Lifestyle Magazine telecast this spring.

"Some marriages burn out because the people in them are too busy," says Coleman. They have stretched themselves too thin climbing the career ladder, running the PTA, and playing racquetball to make the time to enjoy and improve their marriage.

Many other marriages, though, burn out because married life has become drudgery. Amid the kids' problems in school, car repair bills, and plumbing that needs fixing, people lose the incentive to go home.

What conditions set people up for marital burnout? "I think there are a lot of causes," says Coleman. "Some of them have to do with expectations. People may expect marriage to be fun all the time; or even though they said before they got married 'I know this is going to work,' they didn't believe it. They thought it was going to be some kind of extended picnic. They didn't realize that sometimes they were going to be sitting in a room all by themselves, wondering whether they should get out of the marriage or not."

A second major cause of burnout is the lack of rewards. "I often hear women say, 'I give 90 percent and he only gives 10 percent,"' Coleman relates. "It may or may not be true. If you don't know what you want from your marriage, then you have no idea whether your needs are being met. You have a feeling that you'd like more of something, but you don't know what the 'something' is. You're always going to be in trouble until you get concrete and say, 'These are the three or four things that I need."'

Related to feeling rewarded is the joy of sharing new experiences in marriage. Partners need to go to new places, meet new people-in short, add new fuel to the marriage. Otherwise, Coleman feels, spouses can stagnate, like the man in the old story who said, Twenty years ago my wife used to laugh at my jokes. She doesn't laugh anymore, and I'm still telling the same jokes."

At a critical juncture in their own lives, when they faced the empty nest" and needed new experiences, Coleman and his wife candidly discussed how they wanted to spend the next 30 years of their marriage. "We no longer have the children in common," they realized. "So what can we do to make our marriage last?"

They decided to take up a new sport. A week or two ago, my wife beat me at golf," Coleman laughs. "My male friends said, You must have felt terrible.' Actually, I felt great about it, because she was so happy."

To keep their marriage vibrant, the Colemans also decided that they needed a spiritual challenge. So they became involved in a ministry for Laotian refugees and another to help prisoners. "We haven't gone off into separate ministries," he says. "It's a ministry that we share. We can talk about it, pray about it, and get excited about it. it's very satisfying to know that you've reached out to love somebody."

Taking time to seriously plan the direction of a relationship is especially important during the seasons of a marriage when a couple is particularly vulnerable.

Traditionally, the first such stress point follows the birth of the first child. The wife is exhausted from infant care. The husband feels "dethroned" as king of the home and her heart.

"There's a new season now, though, that really baffles me," says Coleman. "People are splitting during the first one to three years. One bad weekend and they are bailing out. That must have to do with expectations."

Another major time for divorce comes after the children pass their teens. "I think you have that second major burnout because you have so many bruises from the teen years," Coleman explains. "Parents bump heads with each other over how they've bumped heads with their teenager. Junior grows up and leaves home. He's doing fine, but the parents are still mad at each other."

Then comes the empty nest. "Now you've come down to reality," Coleman says. "You can't hide any longer behind the children. You have to ask yourselves, Are we together just because we don't want to embarrass our children? Or are we together because we really love each other and we're going to enjoy it?"'

To assess marriage at any season of life, Coleman recommends honestly facing and answering three searching questions:

1. Do we have things we look forward to in our marriage-in the next two weeks as well as the next 15 or 20 years?

2. Do we have hope in our relationship, or is despair the primary emotion?

3. Are we finding satisfaction in our marriage? Are we getting and giving rewards for being married?

Whether or not your marriage has reached the burnout stage, there is hope for making it vibrant again. Coleman emphasizes direct communication, rekindling romance, and cultivating spiritual commitment together. He also recommends using a pay scale.

"I believe that every person needs to get rewarded for being married," he explains. "I think spouses should take a paper and pencil and write down the four or five things they each need to get out of their relationship. It may be time together, more physical contact, conversation. Then hand these lists to each other as a kind of invoice."

"A man in Ohio gave me an idea once," Coleman continues. "He took a coupon book and wrote out 20 coupons for his wife. He said, Any time you want a dinner out, that's one coupon. A weekend away is another coupon.' There were other coupons for washing the dishes and fixing meals. He gave the booklet to his wife and told her she could cash the coupons at any time.

"My wife, Pat, and I did the same thing," says Coleman. "It's a pay system. The Bible says that the workman is worthy of his hire. If people don't get paid, they, start feeling sorry for themselves. Sometimes a coupon book really helps."

Coleman admits that we all marry strangers, no matter how long a couple has dated. "But if we stay strangers, that's inexcusable," he asserts. "We need to take off the masks we hide behind and simply say, 'I want you to know me. I want you to know my hurts, my ambitions, my loves, my fears--everything about me.' The more our spouse knows about us, the closer our relationship will be." And of course, we will want to know more about our spouse too.

Finally, Coleman advises, "Don't allow yourself or your marriage to become boring-stuck in the mud. Find new things to do, things that are fun and things that are helpful for other people. Do those things together. The more of that there is in your marriage, the stronger your marriage will be, and the less likely it is to burn out."