I was married to Roberta for 28 years at the time. Our long marriage had gotten us two teenage girls, a large house and property and money in the bank. We were well-known in our church and had many friends in the neighborhood. Roberta had a good-paying job as a top administrator with the electric company.

But I was getting older; after 28 years sex with Roberta was not longer as exciting as it once was. I thought that I needed something to stimulate my libido and when it fell into my lap I took it.

I met Annie at the annual neighborhood barbecue and we hit it off right away. Annie was divorced and sex-starved. We made love whenever we could, wherever we could, and with no thought about the future.

But as these things often turn out, Roberta eventually found out about my affair. To make matters worse, Annie, who is younger than Roberta, had worked with Roberta at one time long ago, when Annie had tried to take Roberta’s job from her permanently while Roberta was out on maternity leave. And so my betrayal cut twice as deep with my wife. She could not be placated no matter how many times I pledged my love for her or apologized and said that it would never happen again.

“You’re right, it’s never going to happen again”, replied Roberta heatedly. “You’re going to get castrated. It’s either that or you move out and we get divorced.”

I had no defense. I couldn’t give up my kids, my home, and my stature with the congregation and in the community or, especially, Roberta, who I truly loved. I couldn’t take the ignominy of everyone knowing what I had done to hurt her and my family. I would have to move away and give everything up.

“OK, I’ll do it. Just don’t tell anyone about my affair, I beg you”, I said to Roberta. That seemed to dampen her anger a bit. “In the meantime, you’re to sleep in the spare bedroom”, she told me.

The weeks went by and Roberta was more and more civil to me as time passed but I was still relegated to sleeping alone. I really missed the occasional sex with her and the loss of the pleasure of being able to sleep next to her in the nude and feel her breasts and buttocks whenever I wanted.

On the outside, to family and friends, no one knew that there was any problem between us. Although Roberta could hold grudges, I also knew her to be someone who, underneath her hard exterior, was loving and forgiving. It was just a matter of time that what I did would be forgiven and we would be back together as before, I told myself.

It didn’t turn out that way. One Friday night, when the girls were away visiting their grandparents for the weekend, Roberta said to me, without any emotion, “You’re going to have to shave your scrotum tonight because tomorrow you have an appointment to be castrated. The doctor said to make sure that you do a thorough job.”

I was stunned. By then I had thought that things were going so well for us. “This is the only way that I can know that I can trust you anymore”, she told me after seeing the look on my face. “You still have a choice, either be castrated or move out and we divorce.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned, constantly touching my two testicles trying to imagine what it would be like without them.

Early the next morning, I sat in the passenger side of Roberta’s SUV and she drove me to my fate. I tried to reason with her along the way, telling her of my undying love for her and swearing never to cheat on her ever again but the only thing that Roberta would say was, “It’s far too late for that. You’ve already proven to me what you’re capable of. This way, I can be sure that you won’t do it again.”

We arrived at some doctor’s office about an hour’s drive from home in a working-class neighborhood and were greeted by a young, pretty nurse at a desk. We were the only people there that of time the morning. “Hello, I’m glad that you came”, she said cheerfully. “You’ll have to fill out some forms first and then we can get started. The doctor will be in shortly”, she said to the both of us.

The nurse took me into another room, with my wife in tow, and she took my vital signs. Then she had me enter a room set up for operations and told me to get undressed and to lie on the table, while Roberta looked on. The nurse gave me a pill to swallow, covered me with a blanket and strapped me down so I could not move. All that I could see was the ceiling and turn my head from side to side. A cloth curtain at my waist prevented me from seeing anything below when I tried to raise my head.

All this time I was trying not to get hard. Despite my pending future, I was becoming aroused to the point that I’m sure that Roberta and the nurse were aware of my state but there was nothing that I could do to hide it as I lay there strapped to the table.

“Hello, I am Dr. Jean and I will be performing your surgery this morning”, an attractive woman in her late thirties introduced herself to me in a professional manner as I lay there. Behind her stood my wife, who was now dressed in a gown, just like the doctor’s. It occurred to me that Roberta was going to watch my castration to make sure that I went through with it.

“I’m going to give you a succession of a few shots to numb the area”, the doctor told me. I could no longer see her and only hear what she was saying to me. “This will take a few minutes to take effect. I will let you know when I’m ready to start”, she told me. I felt several sharp needles but none of them were too painful and I took the pain as they went in.

In the meantime, I could hear Dr. Jean and my wife talking together. “So we have decided not to go with prosthetic testicles but to remove the scrotum as well, is that correct”, she asked Roberta. “Yes, and I want it to be tight to discourage erections after he is castrated and so that whenever he does make love in the future that the distraction he feels down there will always remind him of his misdeed”, she answered. “Without the appearance of having testicles, he will think twice about showing himself to any other women from now on and there will be no doubt to anyone, including himself whenever he looks in the mirror, that he doesn’t have any.”

Roberta’s vindictive words were a bombshell to me. What happened to my loving wife? I had agreed to being castrated but now she wanted even more. It occurred to me that this was her way to get back at Annie by punishing me. What could I do, now that I was strapped down and not able to move? I kept my mouth shut.

“What I’m doing is tracing the pattern where I will make my cut around the scrotum”, explained Dr. Jean to Roberta. “I will leave enough so that your husband can still have normal erections with a low dose of testosterone in his body without too much discomfort; however, you should know from this type of severe cut that it could become quite painful to him if he were ever in the future to decide to take the normal amount of testosterone recommended for a castrated male and he became aroused.”

When Roberta made no comment, Dr. Jean said, “OK. Let’s get started”. I almost immediately felt a warm instrument slowly circling around my scrotum and suddenly it was cold down there.

“Without the scrotum in the way, the removal of the testes becomes very simple”, the doctor said to my wife. “We can easily make sure that the cords are cut high enough so that they can’t reattach themselves to the remaining scrotal wall.” I felt some tugging in my groin. “Clamps”, said the doctor. “Scalpel”, she said next, and then off to the side I saw the young nurse holding my now severed testicle and cord, still attached to a clamp, as she was putting it into a stainless steel bowl that was sitting on a table to the side. I simultaneously smelled the searing of flesh, as the doctor cauterized the cut.

The same process was repeated as the doctor removed my remaining testicle. "You are now a castrated man", the doctor announced to me when she cut the second cord.

While the doctor closed me up, Roberta stood next to me. “Are you sure that you don’t want me to have my nurse pack up these tidbits to take home with you”, Dr. Jean asked Roberta as the doctor continued to finish her work behind the curtain. “No, you can add them to your collection of other errant husbands’ missing parts”, replied my wife and the three of them laughed together knowingly.

“Welcome back into the family”, Roberta said to me and she leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. On the way home, she added, “You can begin sleeping in our bed again tonight.”

When we began to have marital relations again, sex was painful for me because of the tightness in my groin. I couldn’t wait until Roberta said she was finished so I could pull out. But rather quickly over time my testosterone level dropped, my remaining skin stretched at bit and the erections became not as strong. I was able to make love to my wife with no more than a slight pulling sensation below and I started to enjoy our lovemaking again.

I came to realize that the reason for the tight cut was not so much to punish me but it was Roberta’s way to make sure that I wasn’t tempted to increase my testosterone intake and become unfaithful to her again. She had it done for my own behalf.

Roberta and I have since become the loving couple that we once were before. I’ve had problems adjusting but nothing that the testosterone doesn’t help, as long as I don’t take too much of it. Roberta has been a very caring wife to me, especially when it comes to seeing that I stay healthy. One day recently she kissed me passionately after we had just made love and she said to me, “I didn’t want to have you castrated but I knew that it was the only way. I knew that once you had tasted the forbidden fruit that eventually you would taste it again. And besides”, she added, “you really had it coming to you”.