Three years ago, my (43F) husband (43M) had an affair with a family friend, the affair lasted a year and he came clean about everything to me, all the details and told everyone, it was like he was having a full midlife crisis. Imagine telling your elderly parents that you've been sleeping around? IT was all so uncharacteristic of him. There was a lot of back and forth with whether he was going to leave or stay and I was of the mindset that we could get through it, that our love would win us through and we'd gotten through tough times before, we could get through it. Us having children was a big motivator and I thought long and hard about how this could impact them, in the end I felt us working to rebuild a happy/healthy marriage would be in their best interest.
We signed up to marriage counselling immediately and got to work. For the first 4 months or so, my husband was adamant that at some point he wanted to be friends with the other woman at some point, saying they had a long history of friendship and she was important to him and to the children (Yes, she was close to them and they were confused about why she suddenly vanished from their lives but of course they will move on and forget about her with time). It almost felt like he was using the children to keep bringing her up. Eventually I explained to him that he couldn't have her in his life again that it was a non-starter if it meant rebuilding us and he accepted this and never brought her up again. We continued in marriage counselling for about 18 months and we left it feeling a lot more confident things will work out. We had better communication, better intimacy, more quality time together and so much time as a family.
I have never checked/snooped through my husbands phone throughout this entire time period. He told me he was going to end things with her and I trusted him. Last week, I asked to upload pictures from his phone that his parents had sent him and I was scrolling through chats to find when I noticed he had unblocked her and had attempted to send a message (just 'hi') but it went undelivered, presumably she still had him blocked. I could see from the date, he had just unblocked her recently having had her blocked for two years. I was so hurt seeing he still has her as a contact let alone trying to make contact with her. I didn't want to immediately confront him and wanted to have some time to think about what I should do and I did keep tracks by checking his phone to see if their was any new activity and I also wanted to make sure that there was no signs of anything else happening over these past two years.
Well, it seems this is the only direct contact he has attempted to make but he had tried to reach out to her through her family but they ignored him. He made about three attempts at the start of this year before giving up. That was in Jan/Feb. Now it's august and he tries to contact her directly. I also notice from his social media searches that he periodically looks her up, every few days (having created a fake account to look her up as she blocked him).
All of the behaviour i discovered is alarming but then just yesterday, I noticed that he has blocked her again? So he was curious and probably came to conclusion that it's a bad idea and blocked her again? I don't know what to make of it now
Tl;DR Husband seems to be making attempts to reconnect with woman he cheated with