When maintaining status-bridging friendships, people encounter inequalities in the context of their most intimate relationships. Using interview data on how people manage friendships with significantly poorer and richer friends in Hungary, this article explores lay discourses of inequality and justice, and the processes through which they lead to the decay (or the preservation) of income-bridging friendships at the micro level and to social segregation at the macro level. It shows, first, that different – egalitarian versus meritocratic – lay conceptions of inequality and justice translate into different everyday strategies of managing income-bridging friendships, focused on the hiding versus legitimization of inequalities, respectively. Second, it traces how both of these strategies, which are aimed at maintaining income-bridging friendships, eventually lead to their decay and to growing segregation between social classes.