Bob makes a fantastic point. At least in my case, the importance of keeping a buddy team together was never sufficiently emphasized in open water class, where it mainly consisted of the statements, "Always dive with a buddy," "If you get separated, search for one minute and then do a slow ascent to the surface and stay there." That was pretty much it, and in reality, it's how most people tend to dive. You might stay with a buddy, he/she might stay with you, depending. But it's never ironclad, so it's always inconsistent. No wonder the occasional buddy separation seems to be a fact of life!
But there are alternatives. A buddy team that is trained to work together and stay together rarely, if ever, gets separated. You can have constant feedback and communication (both active and passive) with your buddies, meaning you always know where they are, and more importantly, if one of you happens to stray from the other, and it rather than cramp the style/spontaneity of the dive, it actually makes you feel more free and relaxed, because you're never worried if your buddy is still there--they just are.
So that kind of begs the question, what if something happens to your buddy? IME, when you dive as a real buddy team, you know *immediately* if something happens to them, and vice versa. That puts both of you in the best position to work any problem out together, whether it's a minor inconvenience or a full on emergency. The alternative is, if your buddy gets caught up on something and you're unaware for a minute or two as you're swimming around, he may no longer be in sight when you finally think to look for him.
In a choice between these two possible scenarios, I'll take the first one every time, rather than carry a pony in anticipation of the latter situation occurring.
TS&M likes to say "You don't know what you don't know." At least as it was for me, I had no idea how coherent and fun a real, working buddy team could be, until I saw it for myself.
