I love asking this question when my two older children are cleaning their rooms. "Not funny, Daddy," come the groans. I love it.

Happiness is a tricky thing, isn't it? For several years, it was our goal in marriage. Alfie and I passionately pursued what most of us pursue in marriage, in all of life, really: our happiness! We reasoned that if spending time together made each of us happy, which it did, then why not do it for life?!

Turns out that life is not a perpetual weekend visit. It won't surprise you that there came a time, and quickly, when my happiness and her happiness were at odds. Still happens quite a bit actually. What then? I'll tell you what we did, we simply tried to convince the other that his/her definition was unreasonable and that our personal definition was brilliant. You can imagine Dr. Phil asking, "And how's that workin' for ya?"

Does it surprise you that we needed a few post-marital counseling sessions? It sure surprised us. We were Christians!

Somewhere along the way we made a discovery that will seem simple to you, but it revolutionized our marriage: Individual happiness is not a big enough cause to sustain a healthy marriage.

I know you're saying "duh," but really, that is a huge marriage revelation. We had given mental ascent to that truth, but the reality of it was a bit of a shocker.

If our final cause in marriage is individual, personal happiness, we are in for big trouble.

The problem started before our marriage, though. Marriage was merely the catalyst that brought it to the forefront. Alfie and I never would have thought we were so into our personal happiness as single people. It was such a part of our existence, we hardly noticed it. We noticed it in everyone else, of course, but not in us.

Once our vision for our marriage became bigger than the two of us as individuals, we began to feel the plane slowly lift off the runway. When we finally zeroed in on the vision of marriage being a catalyst to our loving and knowing and becoming more like Christ, we started to fly. When holiness became our target (HT: Gary Thomas), guess what? Happiness started hanging around too. That whole horse-in-front-of-the-cart thing.

So what about you? Have you experienced the frustration of individual "happiness" as a final cause for marriage?

As I was vacuuming the other day, plugging and unplugging and moving around from room to room, lugging that monster up and down stairs, I thought about the first house my wife and I rented.  One of the ways I described its size to people was that I could vacuum the entire house and never unplug the vacuum.

By then, many of our friends seem to be full steam ahead into buying houses, new cars, etc., etc.  My wife was still driving her car from college and I had logged well over 150,000 miles on whatever it was I was driving at the time.  As we watched our friends seemingly pull ahead of us in the "race" of stuff, we struggled.  Going to visit friends became a somewhat painful ordeal, as we, well, coveted their pretty homes and nice cars and all their "stuff."  We always left feeling yuck.

Then one day, one of my wife's friends confided in her how stressed she was.  "About what," Alfie said.  "Our debt.  We can't keep up with it, but we see what everyone else has and we go get it."  And the light came on for us.

My wife and I determined early on to live within our means.  I just figured that everyone else's "means" was a lot higher than ours.  Turns out that we were all at about the same income, give our take a few thousand annually.  The difference in our living situations was debt.  The bottom line was, our friends just didn't want to live in a small house where you could vacuum the whole thing without unplugging.

It's very easy when we start out as a couples to expect to be right where our parents are when we leave their house.  We don't want to start back where they started.  About the only way to do that is to start racking up some debt fast.  My wife and I had to resist the temptation to "despise small beginnings."

I've noticed that this applies not only to "stuff," but to my marriage as well.  My marriage was small in the beginning, but it has continued to grow.  Communication has gotten better.  Sexual intimacy has gotten better.  Everything has gotten better.  But we have sure had to have incredible patience along the way, as we nurtured and waited for things to take root and grow.

Something else I've noticed is that discontentment can stick with you your whole life.  There's always someone else with more.  Learning contentment early on is something that will make huge payoffs in the future.  God gives us exactly what we need in the moment and season in which we're living.  Don't miss the great blessing of now, wishing it away for the next big thing.  You're in it right now.

It's true.  When my wife and I stood before the minister and made those optimistic vows to one another, there was one determined to see it fail.

I try not to find a reason for all my problems in the demonic, but Scripture makes it very clear that we have an enemy whose objective is to kill, steal and destroy all that is divinely beautiful.  And if Christian marriage is intended to be anything, it is intended to be divinely beautiful.

I have many regrets about my first years of marriage, but the greatest is that I did not take more seriously Satan's hatred of it and my responsibility to aggressively fight against him for it.  Put simply, I wish I had prayed more for my wife and with my wife about our marriage.

"Our struggle is not against flesh and blood," Paul reminds us in that familiar passage of Ephesians 6, "but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

I confess I was pretty passive about that spiritual struggle in those early years.  When difficulties came, I rarely thought about evil forces.  My wife and I prayed together once in a while, but it was never an intentional habit of ours.  That has changed over the years, and our marriage has changed--much for the better.

Sure, there are plenty of places to blame marital challenges: old habits of the sinful flesh and a fallen world that opposes all that is Kingdom-minded are two that come to mind.  But let us not forget that there is one who opposes a thriving, God-filled union.  And let us rejoice that our Savior has defeated him!

Any thoughts on building regular prayer into your marriage?  How do you do it?  I'd love to hear ideas...