123: 5 Core Conversations – Julie and David Bulitt
Summary: The Genesis of Five Core Conversations for Couples<br>Julie explains that she met David as an 18-year-old at the University of Maryland, which led to a 33-year marriage. She and David celebrate the fact that their differing work (David is a divorce lawyer, while Julie works as a couple’s therapist) affords them very different perspectives on dating and relationships. They tell us that their experience of marriage in their personal and professional conversations encouraged them to share their insight in a book they named Five Core Conversations for Couples.<br><br>Julie Bulitt is a licensed clinical social worker with a focus on family, couples and individual therapy, ADHD, and executive functioning coaching. She’s been a Clinical Supervisor and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant for the Montgomery County (Maryland) Mental Health Association, and an Adoption Therapist for the Center for Support and Education in suburban Washington, D.C. Currently, she is the in-house therapist for The Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, Maryland.<br><br>David Bulitt is a partner at Joseph, Greenwald & Laake, PA in Washington, D.C. He’s consistently chosen as a top divorce lawyer, was named one of the “Best Lawyers in America” and a “Super Lawyer” in the Washington, D.C. Metro. Due to his personal experiences, David has a strong interest in families with special needs children. He’s written two novels and multiple articles for legal publications.<br><br>The Five Cores<br>David informs us that their book divides the conversations couples need to have in order to build successful relationships into five cores or ‘buckets’. He describes getting to know the other person as the first bucket. The second, third, and fourth are money, kids, and sex, which he says often bring conflict into relationships. Finally, he describes the last bucket as figuring out how to keep the relationship full and growing.<br><br>‘Listen to Julie so that You Don’t Need David.’<br>Julie explains the reason couples seek therapy differs wildly. She says that some people would never go to couple’s therapy, while others go as a last resort to try to avoid divorce, and others seek out couple’s therapy to proactively improve their relationships. She says that people who would never seek out counseling or who try and can’t get it to work for them often wind up in her husband’s office.<br><br>In his work, David found four broad reasons that couples get divorced: money, sex, kids, and ‘general malaise not otherwise specified’. He suspects that less than half of the couples who get divorced have tried to improve their relationship with therapy. Despite this, he tells us he encourages couples with history, kids, and other ties between them to try therapy before going through with a divorce.<br><br>He also discusses that some couples who have been married for twenty or thirty years have had kids dominate their lives for decades. He describes them spending years rushing around and getting the kids to the places they need to be, without ever taking the time to ‘water the garden’ of their relationship. He explains that many people in this situation look at the other person, and fail to find anything they have in common after their kids leave home. He and Julie emphasize that relationships have to be maintained consistently in order to survive.<br><br>Building and Filling Your Relationship<br>Julie explains that new partners need to evaluate whether they’re suited for each other. She encourages couples to evaluate whether they have the same values, whether they both want kids, whether they think one or both partners working is ideal, and the like. She also tells us that maintaining that initial connection and those conversations with date nights and time spent together is essential.<br><br>David interrupts to clarify that their book differs from self-help titles in its personal and detailed nature. For example, he lists chapters about...
