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I found out about this from what appears to be a Japanese calligrapher on YouTube. He says it's a historic version of 恋, but the only evidence of it being historical I found was from a blog with little to no information about it. Where can I find out more about this character?
Surprisingly, it seems there’s some credit to the story. According to the Goo辞典, the old version of 恋 is 戀 and that one does have the variant you are showing.
Here it is in the Ministry of Justice family register character database:
You can see that the “proper” character (正字) is 戀
