Fortunately my Significant Other (SO) doesn't dive, a blessing on the one hand that we never argue on a dive and I only have to buy one set of kit, a curse on the other hand that on holidays she wants to do things other than dive, how unreasonable !
But on the score of solo diving - one of the reasons I have started to move over to diving open water side mount is to give me some redundancy and allow me to develop my solo diving, horror of horrors I'm even thinking of getting a solo card, and one of the reasons is I have so often dived with same ocean buddies, or people who should know better, do pre dive checks and have a plan, but then seem to get water madness as soon as they submerge - the dive plan immediately going out the window.
I had a classic example two weeks ago - I went to a local diving centre at a quarry - we planned to dive to a maximum depth of 22 metres - down to a sunken trawler, then back via a couple of other attractions. There were three of us, two DM level and a third who was AOW equivalent - with about t25 dives. We agreed the other DM and AOW would swim as a buddy pair and I would navigate and essentially be the third party. I had side-mounted 12 ltr tanks, the other DM a single 12 and 3 ltr pony and the AOW was on a single 12 ltr.
When we reached the trawler the other DM suddenly dropped down through a hatch and started to work his way through the boat - the AOW didn't know what to do - and fair play to him did not follow, we had a quick exchange of hand signals - some do not feature in any diving manual I know
- and remained outside, after a few minutes when the other DM had not come out I also penetrated the wreck and found him in the engine room - I signalled we were going to move on - and basically he could come with us or not - his choice, and then followed my line back out.
He did follow, but the conversation when we got back topside was interesting to say the least - the AOW his buddy was not impressed and told him so, the AOW had neither redundancy or experience to go inside, and felt most fed up that there had been no consultation at all, no discussion whilst kitting up or in the dive plan, and he left his buddy to basically 'hang around' until he had finished his trip inside.
Despite us both saying we were unhappy with him, he couldn't see what he had done wrong. - Phil