Marianna Arnaldi is the forty-year-old former editor of La Gaceta, a well respected and appreciated newspaper in Argentina. It is widely accepted that her first experience of love was at a young age when she fell in love with a fellow student in grammar school who was much older than she was. She clearly states that her parents deliberately planned this union between themselves so that they could remain together. Marianna was raised in Buenos Aires, the Capital city of Argentina and graduated at the University of Buenos Aires. She clearly states that her educational attainments have brought her to a position of clarity which has allowed her to understand fully the implications of marrying someone far older than she is and has subsequently committed herself to the work of an international relationship counsellor and marriage advisor.
Marianna used her title to launch a book that was highly successful and has now been translated into over twenty languages. “ARNACTA: My Path in Search of Love” is a deeply personal account of how Marianna Arnaldi met her husband, Llewellyn Roberts, in the early nineties. Marianna spent almost twenty years in Argentina as a professional journalist until her marriage to Roberts in 1998. This experience almost certainly contributed to the excellent way in which her later work as a marriage counselor and marriage counsellor as well as her present work as a consultant focuses on the needs of those in a similar situation to herself, and how to best deal with these issues. “ARNACTA” is clearly not the work of a woman who is merely seeking a passive partner for life and would be more accurately described as a “marriage trainer”.
Marianna is clear about what attracted her to marry Roberts, her deep conviction that her marriage would be a failure as a result of the way in which her parents had raised her and the fact that she had no interest in any other activity other than the one she was engaged in at the time of her marriage. But was this a conscious decision on her part or was there some unconscious pressure from her father that she could not escape? What does seem clear is that the pressure on her came from both his side and from within, and that the depth of that pressure was greater than she would ever admit or understand.