[originaltext]M: What do you mean by a friend, Jean?W: Oh, Robert, to me, frie

M: What do you mean by a friend, Jean?
W: Oh, Robert, to me, friendship is the most important thing in life. It’s more important even than love. If you love someone, you can always fall out of love again, and that can lead to a lot of hurt feelings, bitterness, and so on. But a good friend is a friend for life.
M: Someone who likes the same things that you do, who can argue with and not lose your temper, even if you don’t always agree about things. I mean someone who you don’t have to talk to all the time but can be silent with, perhaps. That’s important, too. You can just sit together and not say very much sometimes. Just relax. I don’t like people who talk all the time.
W: Are you very good at keeping in touch with your friends if you don’t see them regularly?
M: No, not always. I’ve lived in lots of places, and, to be honest, once I move away, I often do drift out of touch with my friends. And I’m not a very good letter writer, either. Never have been. But I know that if I saw those friends again, if I ever moved back to the same place, or for stone other mason we got back into close contact again, I’m sure the friendship would be just as strong as it was before.
W: Several of my friends have moved away, got married, things like that. One of my friends has had a baby recently, and I’ll admit I don’t see her or hear from her as much as I used to...She lives in another neighborhood and when I phone her, she always seems busy.  But that’s an exception. I write a lot of letters to my friends and get a lot of letters from them. I have a friend I went to school with and ten years ago she emigrated to Canada, but she still writes to me every month, and I write to her just as often.