I also think there’s a heaping helping of him having an obsessive personality at play here. He was an obsessively straight laced Navy man. Then he suddenly and obsessively became a pirate. Then he obsessively vowed revenge for Milah and stuck with it for a couple of centuries. Emma is his new obsession, and because he never thought he’d move on after Milah, he equates what he feels for Emma as love, because surely only something as powerful as true love could make him move on, it’s disrespectful to Milah to think of his feelings for Emma as anything less than true love, and so I think he genuinely has himself convinced that it’s love. But I don’t personally think it’s straight up love that he’s feeling for her.
Agreed. Especially since we just had an entire episode of him obsessively searching for his “ship” even though life was perfectly fine without it. He has an obsessive personality–which is totally keeping in tradition to literature Hook.