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Mark Greene is getting laid. It’s not exactly a secret. Between the typical hospital gossip about the girls (plural! Imagine that.) he’s been seen with and Mark’s persistently cheerful attitude - a drastic turn around from his perpetual post-Susan dark cloud to say the least - he might as well have “I orgasmed in the last 24 hours” tattooed on his forehead in big block letters.
It’s not that Doug isn’t happy for him. Doug is thrilled. After all, Doug is the one who’s been trying to get him laid for, well, basically as long as they’ve been friends, but especially since the divorce. He’d lost count of the number of times they talked about it, conversations lobbed back and forth with the rhythm of one of their pickup games; Mark, the last true romantic in Chicago, complaining about the lack of connection on his latest failed date and Doug doing his damndest to convince him the only connection he needed was a physical one, and desperately.
This should go down as an unprecedented win in the Ross department. Only last year Mark had been as close to a virgin as a married man with a nine year old daughter could be, nervously confessing to Doug that he’d only been with one woman his entire life. Now he’s juggling multiple girls at once after going a couple rounds with Chuny Marquez - and whew, Chuny. She is not a woman you could take for a ride with training wheels on. His little boy is all grown up.
Or growing, anyway. As enthusiastic as Mark is, he’s still wildly out of his depth and reliant on Doug for relationship advice with a level of helplessness that’s somewhere between a dog with a missing limb and a child that’s fallen down a well. Doug, being the kind and generous soul that he is, doesn’t mind.
(Okay, maybe he does a little. Doug’s therapist has been preaching that whole “radical honesty” thing, and he figures as long as he’s shelling out 100 bucks per hour, he might as well try it out.
The radical truth is that there’s a part of his brain that gets a mean thrill out of it. That Mark Greene, everyone’s go-to guy, needs Doug, resident screw up, and desperately at that. That Doug’s years of hound-dogging, which had been at best tolerated and at worst the cause for weeks long freeze outs, were suddenly something Mark wanted to aspire to.
Hypocrisy has always been one of Mark’s strong suits. Doug likes to think forgiveness is one of his, so he tries to let this feeling go whenever it comes over him. He’s successful most of the time. Doug’s therapist is also a big believer in small victories.)
So again, Doug really is happy for him. It’s just- a little strange, is all.
The thing is, Doug never actually expected Mark to follow his advice. Aside from the - just kind of everything about him, there was Susan Lewis. Susan Lewis, who was intelligent and beautiful and funny and kind and who, though he would never admit it to himself, especially with a wedding ring on his finger, Mark was ass-backwards in love with. After Mark’s divorce, Doug, along with pretty much everyone else at County, were just waiting for them to get together. They were perfect for each other! It seemed inevitable that they would date for a socially acceptable period of time before getting hitched and pumping out some sensible, bespectacled kids.
Then: Arizona. A lot of things changed after Susan left. It only figured Mark would change too.
Then again, things were changing all over. Doug, for example. Of course, there was the aforementioned therapy, but that was a footnote compared to the real headline: Doug Ross is not getting laid. On purpose. He knows, he knows. Mark’s playing at Casanova while Doug’s in a self-imposed dry spell? He can hear the Twilight Zone theme now, and see Rod Serling smoking in the corner as he waits for his time to monologue.
Doug has done a lot of things he’s not exactly proud of, hurt a lot of women who cared for him because it was easier than committing to them. Carol, Diane, Karen… If he was a better person then he would’ve changed for love, or some other bullshit romantic notion a long time ago. The kind of thing you see in the movies.
But Doug was no movie star. He was a selfish bastard and the son of a selfish bastard. He stopped spending his nights sleeping around because he wanted to be able to live with himself in the morning. After all, he might not have killed Nadine Wilkes, but he had been more than happy to fuck her without even knowing her name, just another man in a long line of men taking advantage of her self destructive streak to get a little gratification and had been more than happy to do this to countless women before her. It wasn’t until he was faced with the direct result of his indifference that he realized what kind of a man he’d become. Worst of all, he knows that if he got even a hint of validation from Mark or Carol, the smallest indication that they’d let him off the hook, he would’ve found a way to put it past him, happy to dismiss it as a fluke that surely had no indications towards his character. The guilt could eat a guy alive.
So he ran to the mother-loving arms of Freud and took up the whole celibate, monastic lifestyle.
It was going as well as it could go, all things considered. He still got the old urges, like a gambling addict standing on the Vegas Strip, but he wasn’t going into any of the casinos and it had been a few months. Guilt, it seemed, was as effective a libido killer as a cold shower.
Besides, every time a slipup seemed imminent, he thought about being ten years old, clutching his mom as they listened to Ray begging at their door saying honey, please, this time it’s different, baby c’mon, I really changed, only to have him leave again when a month of Suburbia drove him into the arms of another woman. Doug figured sainthood was out of the question, but the least he could do was make sure that his father’s legacy ended there, outside in the cold.
Maybe it was time for some more radical honesty. It was entirely possible that Doug’s hang ups with Mark’s newly acquired sex life were about more than just its novelty.
Growing up with Ray Ross as a father really fucked Doug up, sometimes in ways he’d long since acknowledged, sometimes in ways that took him by surprise even now. When Doug started on his grand quest of self discovery, he was pretty quickly confronted for the first time with the fact that he doesn’t- he isn’t-
Doug’s not really sure what it means to be a person most of the time. But when he tries to picture the kind of guy he wants to be, giving and patient and kind, well, that person looks a hell of a lot like Mark Greene. Flaws and all, he’s the best guy that Doug has ever known.
Except now Mark is acting more like Doug and Doug doesn’t know who to be.
But that isn’t especially fair to Mark, now is it. He’s certainly no candidate for sainthood either. He’s just a guy, doing his best, same as the rest of them. A guy who’s been there for Doug even when, by all rights, he probably should have given up on him a long time ago. So why should Doug begrudge him any happiness he finds after getting his heart broken twice. Because of Doug’s bullshit? No way.
So Mark is getting laid in and Doug isn’t. Maybe, some day in the distant future, Mark will quit emergency medicine to pursue a career in the adult film industry and Doug will join the priesthood. Maybe they’ll wake up tomorrow and everything will go back to how it was before. Doug can’t speak for the future, but he can say one thing for certain: whatever happens, he and Mark are in it together. What are best friends for?