Pakks Co Facebook ad: “This almost broke me”

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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. 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, 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 (in the best way...) 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. The night. Mae's 8th birthday was a Saturday in March 2023. By 8:30 that night the house was quiet. I went into her room for her last bedtime as a seven-year-old. She said: "Mum, I have a question." I said: "Okay, sweetheart." She said: "Do you and Daddy still love each other?" 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." I kissed her forehead. I closed her door. I walked to the bathroom 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. Mae was the first person to call it out. After her birthday, I started seeing it everywhere. The way Tom and I sat on the couch in the evenings — both of us scrolling, neither of us talking. The way we'd had dinner the Thursday before her birthday and the only thing we'd discussed for forty minutes was Henry's soccer registration. I started a note in my phone called "Things I haven't said to Tom in 2023." By the end of March it had 23 items on it. What didn't work. Couples therapy. Two rounds, $2,220 total. We'd talk in the session, leave, be quiet in the car all the way home, and within 24 hours we were back to logistics. A couples retreat in Byron. $1,180 plus flights plus the dog-sitter. The retreat was lovely. We came home, and by 8:30pm the next Sunday 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 book stack. Seven marriage books. An Esther Perel audiobook I never finished. A $147 online course. Tom didn't read any of them. $3,600 in twenty-eight months. Nothing to show for it except an increasing private certainty that this was just what long-term marriages became. Dr. Foster. I started seeing Dr. Foster in January 2026 for individual therapy. On the fourth session, near the end of the hour, she asked: "Anna, how are things with Tom?" I said: "We're okay. We're just busy." She didn't say anything for ten seconds. Then she said: "Anna. The thing that destroys most of the marriages I see is not affairs. It's not arguments. 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. The couples who turn toward each other in those small moments stay married. The ones who don't, don't." She said: "What you and Tom need isn't another retreat. It isn't another block of therapy. It is a daily practice. It can be short - no longer than ten minutes. One question without anything attached. The important thing is that you do it every day. Because what you are describing is the early stage of the slow ending." She wrote two products on a Post-it. One was a workbook. One was a card deck designed in Australia. She'd consulted on the deck. Reconnect Deck by Pakks. I walked to my car. I sat there for forty minutes. I was thinking about the bathroom tiles. I was thinking about Henry, who will be 14 in three years. 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 ordered the deck that night from my driveway. $64 plus shipping. The week the box sat there. It 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. I was not going to be the person who spent another $64 and another evening watching another solution not save her marriage. On a Tuesday night, after the kids were in bed, I unstacked the dishwasher and opened the box. I read the cards by myself at the bench for ten minutes first. They were soft cream cardstock. The questions were not only "what's your favourite memory of us" — they were the kind of questions a good therapist would ask. Specific. Open. 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. He put his phone face-down on the coffee table. He said: "Okay." I almost cried right there. The first card said: "What's something you used to look forward to that you haven't done in a while?" Tom thought for twelve seconds. Then he said: "Driving down the coast on a Sunday. Like we used to do before Henry was born." I'd forgotten we used to do that. Then Tom did something I want you to pay attention to. He said: "What about you?" 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 book, he asked me back. I cried on the couch. 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 Dr. Foster. I told him about the bathroom tiles after Mae's birthday. I told him about the private list of things I hadn't said to him. We did one more card. 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. What I'd tell the version of me on the bathroom tiles. The drift is here. You will not outrun it by being busier. You will not outrun it by being kinder. You can't fix it alone. You can't fix it by going to therapy once a fortnight. You can't fix it on a weekend in Byron. 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 he has to actually think about, and then let him ask you one back, and do it again the next night. That is what you have not tried. It costs $64. That's it. It feels insane not to try it. The simple part. The deck is the Reconnect Deck. The company is Pakks. The cards were created with professional therapist input and research. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee if you're still not sure. That definitely helped me, as I couldn't imagine being out more money with no answers. pakks.co Buy one. Open it the day it arrives. 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?" If he says yes, do one card. Let him answer. Then notice whether he asks you back. That is the part to watch. Whatever you do next is on you. — Anna, Marrickville, Sydney, June 2026 P.S. Mae asked me again last Sunday morning at the kitchen bench, with cereal. She watched Tom and me 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. I went into the laundry and stood next to the dryer and cried for ten minutes because the answer this time was true.

Where the ad sends people

pakks.co

This almost broke me

Reconnect Deck — 150 questions, 3 categories.