Pakks Co Facebook ad: “My eight-year-old daughter asked me at bedtime whether…”

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"My eight-year-old daughter asked me at bedtime whether her dad and I still loved each other. I lied. Then I spent the next three years and $3,600 trying to make the lie true. Last March a marriage therapist named Dr. Foster* sat me down in her Stanmore practice and told me what I'd actually been doing wrong — and I sat in her car park afterwards for 40 minutes because I couldn't drive home and look at him. My name is Anna. I'm 43. I live in Marrickville, Sydney. I've been married to Tom for fourteen years. We have two kids — Henry, who is eleven, and Mae, who turned eleven in March. I'm writing this at 3:15 in the morning because Mae asked me the same question last Sunday morning that she asked me three years ago. The answer was different this time. I haven't been able to sleep since. I need to tell you what Mae asked me on the night of her 8th birthday. What I did with that question for three years — the therapy, the retreat, the books, the way I stopped expecting Tom to be the man I'd married. What Dr. Foster told me last March that made me sit in her car park for 40 minutes. And what I almost didn't buy six months later because I had stopped believing anything could be different. If you're a woman in your forties in a long-term marriage, and you have ever lied to one of your kids about whether you and their dad were okay — please read to the end. I am not getting those three years back. You might still have yours. The night. Mae's 8th birthday was a Saturday in March 2023. We had eleven of her friends over in the backyard. There was a piñata shaped like a unicorn. Tom barbecued sausages. He and I didn't speak to each other once between 11am and 4pm — not because we'd fought, but because we were both busy, and we hadn't had a non-logistical conversation in maybe eighteen months. Neither of us noticed. By 8:30 that night the house was quiet. Henry was asleep down the hall. Tom was downstairs unstacking the dishwasher. I went into Mae's room for her last bedtime as a seven-year-old. She had a pink sleep mask pushed up on her forehead like a hairband. Her bedside lamp was on the lowest setting. She smelled like the strawberry shampoo she'd insisted on for her birthday. She said: ""Mum, I have a question."" I said: ""Okay, sweetheart."" She said: ""Do you and Daddy still love each other?"" I will tell you exactly what I said because I have replayed it four hundred times. I said: ""Of course we do, Mae. Why would you ask that?"" She said: ""Because you don't talk anymore."" I said: ""Mums and dads get really busy, sweetheart. That's all it is. We love each other very much."" I kissed her forehead. I turned off the lamp. I closed her door. I walked to the bathroom and shut the door and sat on the tiles with my back against the bath for twenty minutes. I didn't cry. I just sat there. Mae was eight years old. And she had noticed. The lies I told myself. I had been telling myself for two years that we were just busy. Henry had started high school. Mae had had a big year with swimming. Tom's firm had a major tender on. My mum had finished her last round of chemo in October. There was always a reason we hadn't really talked. Always a reason it was just this month, just this quarter, just this season. Mae was the first person who said the thing out loud. I started hearing it everywhere after that. The way Tom and I sat on the couch in the evenings — both of us scrolling, neither of us talking, neither of us touching. The way we'd had dinner the Thursday before her birthday and the only thing we'd discussed for the full forty minutes was whether Henry's soccer registration was due that week or next. The way I'd watched a friend's husband put his hand on her lower back at a school fundraiser two months earlier and felt something I didn't want to name. I started a private note on my phone called ""Things I haven't said to Tom in 2023."" By the end of March it had 23 items on it. I didn't tell anyone. The three things that didn't work. I tried three things over the next two and a half years. I am going to tell you what each one cost me and why it didn't work, because I think most women in my situation are about to spend the same money on the same things. The first thing was couples therapy. We booked our first round in May 2023 — four sessions with a counsellor in Newtown, $260 each. Made it to all four. Booked four more. Cancelled two (""Tom's deadline""), rescheduled one, and then quietly let the booking lapse. I told myself it was the Tuesday night time slot. I knew that wasn't true. We booked a second round in February 2024 with a different counsellor in the city. Four sessions, $295 each. The pattern was always the same: we'd talk in the session, leave, be quiet in the car all the way home, unstack the dishwasher when we got home, and within 24 hours we were back to logistics. Therapy was a once-a-fortnight performance. Nothing about our actual evenings ever changed. Total: $2,220. I want to be very clear about something before I go any further. I am not anti-therapy. We had two good therapists. Neither of them did anything wrong. They were doing the job they are trained to do, which is to help couples talk about hard things for fifty minutes a fortnight in a quiet room. The problem wasn't them. The problem was that we needed something to do on the other thirteen nights of the fortnight, in our own house, after the kids were asleep. And that wasn't a thing therapy is set up to give you. The second thing was a couples retreat in Byron. A long weekend in October 2024. $1,180 plus the flights plus the dog-sitter plus the wine. The retreat was lovely. We held hands during a sound bath. We did a workshop on attachment styles. We had sex for the first time in five months. We came home on the Sunday night, the kids slept at Mum's, we ordered Thai for dinner, and by 8:30pm we were both on our phones on opposite ends of the couch. Within a week it was as if the weekend hadn't happened. The third thing was the book stack. I bought The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. I bought Attached. I bought Hold Me Tight. I bought the Esther Perel audiobook on the way to school drop-off and listened to seven minutes of it before Mae asked me a question and I never opened it again. I bought a $147 online course called ""Reconnect Method"" from an Instagram therapist with 380,000 followers. Tom didn't read or watch any of them. I read pieces of all of them. The books are still on my bedside table. I look at them most nights with the same feeling I get when I look at a treadmill. Total: $200. You can do the maths. $3,600 in twenty-eight months. I had nothing to show for it except an increasing private certainty that this was just what long-term marriages became and I was the only one who hadn't accepted it yet. In November 2025, on Mae's request, we put up the Christmas tree the first weekend of December. Tom and I unpacked twelve boxes of decorations next to each other in the living room. We exchanged eleven sentences in two and a half hours. I counted. That was the bottom. Dr. Foster. I started seeing Dr. Foster in January 2026 for individual therapy. I was 42 and my GP had told me I was burnt out. I told Tom I was going to see someone about ""managing stress."" That was technically true. Dr. Foster is in her early fifties. Short dark hair going grey at the temples. She wears Birkenstocks in the office. She trained in Melbourne, did fifteen years in private practice in Sydney's eastern suburbs, and now works out of a converted house in Stanmore. She has been a couples and individual therapist for twenty-two years. She is also the clinician who consulted on the design of the Reconnect Deck. I did not know this when I started seeing her. I will come back to that part. We did four sessions on my stress, my mum, work, and Mae. On the fourth session, near the end of the hour, Dr. Foster asked me a question that I think she had been waiting to ask: ""Anna, how are things with Tom?"" I said: ""We're okay. We're just busy."" She didn't say anything for about ten seconds. Then she said something I am going to try to write as close to verbatim as I can. I wrote it down in my Notes app the second I sat in my car afterwards. ""Anna. Can I tell you something I don't usually say in an individual session? I have been doing this for twenty-two years. The thing that destroys most of the marriages I see is not affairs. It's not arguments. It's not even resentment, really. It's drift. It is years of small bids for connection that go unanswered, until one or both partners stop making them. John Gottman calls them bids. He says most of them are missed by accident — one partner is reading a book, one partner is on their phone, the kids interrupt — and over years, the missed bids add up. The data on this is decades old. The couples who turn toward each other in those small moments stay married. The ones who don't, don't. It is the single most predictive behaviour we have."" She paused. I didn't say anything. She said: ""What you and Tom need isn't another retreat. It isn't another block of therapy. It is a daily practice. Ten minutes. One question. No pressure. Not a Tuesday night session every fortnight — every day. Because what you are describing to me, the way you're describing it, is the early stage of the slow ending. And I do not want that for you. Especially because Mae is eleven and she'll start noticing properly in the next two years. She already has, hasn't she."" I told her about the birthday question. She nodded slowly. She said: ""Then she has already noticed. The question is whether the answer she gets when she is fourteen is the same as the answer she got when she was eight, or whether it's different."" Then she said: ""Can I tell you something that is technically outside the scope of an individual session? The industry I work in serves three markets really well, and a fourth one almost not at all. We serve couples in active crisis — affairs, screaming, separation considered. That's most of couples therapy, and it's the right tool for them. We serve dating and new couples — that's where most of the popular content lives. And we serve content-consumers, women like you who buy the books and the courses for the awareness. The market we do not serve well is long-term partnered women who are still in love, still committed, but quietly drifting. Those women need a daily tool more than they need a fortnightly intervention. The relationship-content industry has spent a decade selling that woman more awareness, when she already has enough awareness. What she needs is something to do tonight. With her partner. For ten minutes. Without it being A Thing."" She stopped. I asked her what she would recommend. She said: ""There are two products I send my clients to. One is a workbook. One is a card deck designed in Australia. I helped consult on the deck. I'll write the name down for you, but I want you to buy it yourself — not because I told you to, but because you decided you wanted to do something different than what you've already tried."" She wrote it on a Post-it. Reconnect Deck. Pakks. I walked out to my car. Sat in the driver's seat. Did not turn the key. I sat there for forty minutes. I was thinking about the bathroom tiles after Mae's birthday. I was thinking about Henry, who will be 14 in three years. I was thinking about every Christmas tree I had unpacked next to Tom without speaking. I was thinking about my friend Pri at work, whose marriage ended in 2023 — she'd told me afterwards: ""Anna, I don't think we ever actually decided to stop. I think we just got too tired to start again."" I drove home. I didn't tell Tom about the appointment. I ordered the deck that night from the car when I parked in our driveway, on my Mastercard ending in 7203. $64 plus shipping. The week the box sat there. The deck arrived on a Thursday. I left it on the kitchen bench in its packaging for nine days. I had spent $3,600 on things that should have worked and hadn't. I was not going to be the person who'd spent another $64 and another evening watching another solution not save her marriage. Tom saw it on the bench on a Saturday morning. He said: ""What's that?"" I said: ""Just something I ordered."" He didn't push. It sat there for another four days. On a Tuesday night, after the kids were in bed, I unstacked the dishwasher and I opened the box. I took out the cards and sat at the kitchen bench reading them by myself for ten minutes. They were soft cream cardstock. The questions were not what I'd braced for. They were not ""what's your favourite memory of us"" — they were the kind of questions a good therapist would ask in a good session. Specific. Not loaded. Open in a way that made it hard to answer with a sentence. I went into the living room. Tom was on the couch with his phone. I said: ""Do you want to try one of these?"" He looked at the box for a long time. Then he put his phone face down on the coffee table. He said: ""Okay."" I almost cried right there. We did the first card. The question was: ""What's something you used to look forward to that you haven't done in a while?"" Tom thought about it for maybe twelve seconds. Then he said: ""Driving down the coast on a Sunday. Just driving. Like we used to do before Henry was born."" I'd forgotten we used to do that. We used to leave at 7am on Sundays with thermoses of coffee and we'd drive to Stanwell Park and have eggs at the kiosk and drive back. We had done that easily a hundred times in our first three years together. We had not done it once since 2014. Then Tom did something I want you to pay attention to. He said: ""What about you?"" That is the sentence. That is the moment. I am going to write it on its own line because I want you to feel what I felt: He asked me back. After eighteen months of being the only person who initiated anything, the only person who noticed the gap, the only person who suggested couples therapy and the retreat and read the books — after eighteen months of asking him questions and watching him answer and never being asked anything back — he asked me back. I cried. On the couch. He hadn't seen me cry about us in maybe four years. He reached over and took my hand and he said: ""Anna."" Just my name. The way he used to say it. I told him about the appointment with Dr. Foster. I told him about the bathroom tiles after Mae's birthday. I told him I had been keeping a private list on my phone of things I hadn't said to him. I read him three of them. We did one more card that night. Then we went to bed at 11pm and talked in the dark for another forty minutes about nothing important. That was March 14, 2026. Three years to the day since Mae's 8th birthday. The women in my life. I told my friend Sarah from school the next morning at drop-off. She had bought the Go Deeper Deck from Pakks last June and had been doing it with her husband most weeks since. When I told her I'd ordered the Reconnect Deck on Dr. Foster's recommendation, she said: ""Oh god. I've been wondering about that one for months and didn't know how to bring it up with you."" She ordered hers that afternoon. We sat on the brick wall outside Mae's school for thirty-five minutes and I cried and she cried and we agreed that the women in our lives needed to know about this. My friend Pri at work ordered a Reconnect Deck in April. She did one card with her new partner on a Sunday afternoon and he said something that made her cry and made her stay. She had been on the edge of breaking up with him for six months. My sister Beth in Newcastle ordered the Laughter Deck in April for the holiday house — when the whole extended family is up there and there are eight cousins making noise — and a Reconnect Deck for her best friend who is going through a hard year. My friend Lou — who I have known since the first week of university — read this story in draft a week ago and ordered a Reconnect Deck before she finished reading. Six women in my life have bought this deck because of conversations I have had over the last three months. Five of them have told me, unprompted, that it has changed something at home. Why I am writing this. Nobody paid me to write this. I do not work for Pakks. Nobody sent me free cards. I paid $64 on my Mastercard ending in 7203 on March 4, 2026. I bought the Laughter Deck on May 1 to keep at my parents' beach house. I bought the Go Deeper Deck for my sister Beth's 45th in May. I do not have an affiliate code. I am Anna. I am 43. I live in Marrickville. I am married to Tom. I have two kids. I am writing this at 3:15 in the morning because Mae asked me the question again last Sunday morning and the answer this time was different. What I would tell the version of me who sat on the bathroom tiles. If I could drive back to the night of March 14, 2023 and sit on the bathroom tiles next to the version of me who had just lied to her daughter, I would tell her this. The drift is here. You will not outrun it by being busier. You will not outrun it by being kinder. You will not outrun it by becoming a better version of yourself while he stays the same. You can't fix it alone, and you can't fix it by going to therapy once a fortnight, and you can't fix it on a weekend in Byron, and you can't fix it by reading another book. What you can do is sit on the couch with the man downstairs and ask him one question that he actually has to think about, and then let him ask you one back, and do it again the next night, and the night after that. That is what you have not tried. You will spend $3,600 trying to fix the marriage from the outside before you understand that it can only be fixed from the inside. From the couch. From ten minutes after the kids are in bed. It is not therapy. It does not replace therapy. It is the daily practice Gottman has been telling people for thirty years to build, and the thing every long-term-partnered woman I know keeps being too tired to do. It costs $64. Buy it. You can accept that this is what marriages become after fifteen years. You can keep telling yourself it's just this month, just this quarter, just this season. You can keep buying the books, taking the weekends, booking the therapy you'll cancel. Or you can refuse. The simple part. The deck is called the Reconnect Deck. The company is Pakks. They are Australian. The cards were designed with a clinical consultant — Dr. Foster, who has asked to remain anonymous, and who does not know I am writing this. $64. 30-day money-back guarantee. Here is the link: pakks.co Buy one. Open it the day it arrives. Put it on your bedside table or your kitchen bench. Wait until a Tuesday or Wednesday night when the kids are in bed. Pick up the box. Walk into the living room. Say: ""Do you want to try one of these?"" See what he says. If he says yes, do one card. Let him answer. Then notice whether he asks you back. That is the part to watch. If he doesn't ask you back the first time, do another one a week later. If he never asks you back, you will at least know. The drift is coming. It is already at your house. You can feel it in the silences after dinner that used to be conversations. You can feel it in the way you reach for your phone instead of for him. You can feel it in the bedtime questions your kids have started asking that you don't know how to answer. In 2023 I had no way of knowing what was happening to my marriage because nobody had named it for me. In 2026, you do. Whatever you do next is on you. — Anna Marrickville, Sydney June 2026 P.S. The seven marriage books are still on my bedside table. I have not moved them. I marked the cover of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work with the date I stopped reading it — 4 June 2023. The Reconnect Deck sits on top of the stack now. We have done forty-one cards together so far. P.P.S. Tom has started picking the cards. Most nights he is the one who suggests it. Last Wednesday he picked one and asked me about it before I'd even sat down on the couch. I had to go into the kitchen for a glass of water so he wouldn't see my face. P.P.P.S. Mae asked me again last Sunday morning at the kitchen bench, with cereal. Tom and I had been doing the crossword together with two coffees and she came in and sat down across from us and watched us for a minute. Then she said: ""Mum, are you and Daddy okay?"" I sat down across from her. I said: ""We are better than we have been in a long time, Mae. Thank you for asking."" She nodded. She went back to her cereal. I went into the laundry and stood next to the dryer and cried for ten minutes because the answer this time was true. If you have a sister, a friend, a daughter, anyone in your life who has ever lied to one of her kids about whether she and their dad are okay — send her this. It is not for everyone. It is for the ones who have been quietly trying to make the lie true. Please. *Based on a real customer story shared with permission. Some names, dates, and details have been composited for privacy. ""Dr. Foster"" is a pseudonym for the practising marriage therapist who consulted on the development of the Reconnect Deck. She has asked to remain anonymous for client-privacy reasons."

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