What Gives, Mr. Heidkamp??

Though this concept has been argued in a couple different posts already, I'm gonna make it mine too.

I wasn't in class today, so I didn't hear the end of Mr. Heidkamp's CRAZY spiel about social constructs from yesterday, but I'm really hoping he connected it back to existentialism and Meursault and wasn't just preaching at us about how stupid religion is, how love isn't real. The latter is the part of the argument that really rustled my jimmies more than anything else.

How can you say that love is nothing but a social construct, but pain and suffering are real? You say that love is made up, a sort of reaction formation that covers up the eternal agony mankind collectively experiences (the ONLY feeling that's legitimate, apparently). What does real mean to you? Perhaps you mean that love cannot exist without other people, and to a point that is true. But isn't a lot of the pain one experiences the result of other people too? You'll be affected if a loved one is hurt, or if someone bullies you. Words can be just as damaging as sticks and stones, if not worse, if the circumstances are right. And if you're empathetic, the knowledge that somebody else is hurting and suffering will often result in more pain than not having known them at all. By your logic, doesn't that make emotional pain nothing but a social construct too?

To that you might say that pain has a physical feeling rather than just psychological, caused by stimulus from injury. You could go into human anatomy and describe nerve cells and pain receptors and how they function, but isn't love a result of the nervous system as well? In Escape from Spiderhead, the test subjects were pumped full of hormones and chemicals that forced them to feel emotions of all shapes and sizes, from love to anguish in a matter of seconds. While the nervous system interprets pain receptors, the brain can also pump dopamine into your system to give you the happy go lucky feeling many people experience in love. A basic explanation of love as a bodily function is given here: http://www.wikihow.com/Understand-Love-As-a-Chemical-Reaction . Love can be just as physical as pain.

Next you might say that while pain can exist without any social interaction, like stubbing your toe on a table or tripping on a log and breaking your ankle, love can only be experienced between people. But then why do I love mountains? How can I love the ocean? Or the smell of rain? I love my childhood stuffed animals. Obviously, none of these are human. And if people had never influenced my opinions in my entire life, I wouldn't think those things any less beautiful. Just like pain, true love can exist without any human interaction at all.

Both love and pain can be emotional, both love and pain can be physical. How else can you define emotions and sensations? They can both be influenced by social interactions, they can both be independent. Why can't pain and suffering be constructs to limit too much love, why does it have to be your way? And I haven't even gotten into how love and pain are completely subjective and vary from person to person, I don't mind you arguing one way or another that they're primarily social constructs or concrete sensations, but your inconsistency is unjust and unreasonable and ridiculous and sdf;ldfgklahsdlvkghjadfs. How dare you. For me, that doesn't make any sense in the world.