One of the things that make answering this question with certainty is defining love itself. If it means continued and lasting affection, then we can say that some reptiles display behavior that fits that pattern, but it's very hard to understand their internal reasoning which means we have do a lot of guessing.
I guess that some reptiles might be able to have emotions that lead to behaviors that look like love and might actually be some form of love. Like the example with your friend. But is it really love?
Your explanations about seemingly affectionate behavior make a lot of sense, but how can we be sure that that's what the reptiles are actually thinking and that those are their reasons.
While the jury is still out, we can also add that we would expect to see love in social species more than others. Are there example of social reptiles?
I will look more into this. From what I read the most social were iguanas. I have to dig deeper though to fully answer this question. I agree that there is a lot of guess work and really nobody can answer this with 100% certainty but I am leaning toward most "affection" from snakes (at the least) being due to misinterpreting their actions. However, it certainly varies by animal. I will dig deeper and report back tomorrow with my findings on social reptiles.
The hardest part I think is that we only see behaviors and it's really hard to ever be certain of the motivations behind them. If it looks like affection, how do we know that it is or isn't affection or some other emotion that we are not familiar with ourselves.