Friendship depends on equality, yet friends are seldom fully equal. In this article, we investigate failed and difficult friendships through attention to the relationship between (in)equality, recognition, and “rules of irrelevance.” Based on interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city, we argue that since friendship offers the chance to develop an identity and be recognized as a whole person, it encounters difficulty when friends will not or cannot enact rules of irrelevance around their inequalities. We identify four flashpoints that may undermine those rules of irrelevance: authority over a friend, unequal cultural capital, suffusion of work relations and friendship, and complexities of cross-gender friendships.