On October 9th, 2009, Trueson Daugherty arrived in Oklahoma to meet Zia Bowles, the woman he might marry. That might sound strange unless you understand the world he and Zia grew up in. Both were born into the Unification Church, where arranged marriages are common, and matches are typically facilitated through parents or church leadership. When Trueson turned 18, he told his mom he was ready.
At the time they were both in school, with Zia studying Fine Arts and Trueson pursuing Graphic Design; he was living in Virginia, and she was in Turley, Oklahoma. Through a web of church connections and family friendships, their names reached each other’s parents, and conversations quickly turned into plans. Photos were exchanged, though not equally. Trueson sent pictures of himself so Zia would recognize him, but he made a deliberate choice to not see her beforehand.
“I didn’t want to know what she looked like,” he said. “I wanted to know nothing until I just met her for the first time, which is not really the way it’s done, but that was my preference.” When he finally arrived in Turley, everything was unknown—including where in the world he was—except the intention behind it.
What followed were three months of calls, texts, and long conversations, the slow unfolding of personalities that usually comes on a first date. In this case, the stakes were much higher.
Later, when Zia came to Virginia to meet his family, something shifted for Trueson. “That was when I really started falling for her. And I was like, I think this girl is cool. I think I want to marry her.”
While certainty came quickly to Trueson, for Zia, the experience required more time.
“It was a lot to process,” she said. “The first few days I was just trying to figure out who this person was.… You kind of go from not dating at all to all of a sudden, ‘do you want to marry him?’”
Still, the choice was theirs, and it was common in the church to meet multiple matches before getting engaged. In their case, neither had met anyone else before, but there was an unexpected sense of familiarity between the two.
“When I first met her, I felt like we had known each other,” Trueson said. “It wasn’t like ‘so where did you go to school?’ Like I could just fill in the blanks.”
Despite being from completely different places and raised in entirely different family dynamics, Zia had felt it too. “There’s like an instant understanding,” she said.
Nine months after their engagement, one year to the day they first met, they were married in 2010. In accordance with The Unification Church’s large-scale wedding ceremony practice, the couple married at a satellite mass wedding in New York with 30 couples. Zia and Trueson’s ceremony was smaller but still connected to that larger tradition in which many couples flew to Korea, and thousands wedded at once.
The scale of the ceremony was grand, just like the Church behind it, but for Trueson and Zia, the relationship rapidly became their anchor. Years later, in the fall of 2014, the couple left the Church, but they never questioned their relationship.
“For me it was never a question of like, well, what does [leaving] mean for us?” Zia said.
”By 2015, it was like, solidly, I don’t really believe in this thing,” he said. “I went from full zealot. I mean I never loved the church, but I've always been really into duty and righteousness. I’m all or nothing.”
Zia approached it differently: “For me, I like little gray wishy washy areas. So I’m not in my church anymore, but, you know, we’ll see.”
If their faith had once been the foundation, what replaced it was not ideology, but partnership. What they actually found themselves lacking wasn’t belief, but belonging.
“After I left, I felt more and more kind of alone and isolated,” Trueson reflected. “There wasn’t an overreaching umbrella that bound us together.… And that was something I really missed when we left the cult. Because the cult had that in spades.”
“I don’t miss the, you know, culty stuff,” Zia clarified.
But what they did carry forward were the values of gathering, ritual, and shared meaning: elements that now show up in their art practices, rather than religion. Trueson, especially, centers his work on collective experience and transformation.
“I really love conceptual art, and I like performance art, where the art is something that is not a physical artifact,” he said. “And so the gathering is the art, that’s the art form.”
Their creative lives are also where their love shows up most tangibly in the daily, practical ways they make space for each other’s dreams. Trueson once had a stable job in technology, but left it to pursue art full time.
“I just felt kind of empty,” he said. “So I quit my job and started doing art full time. And I make significantly less now than I did before. But because of Zia, I’m able to do that.”
Zia works full time in art restoration, a career she has steadily built since early in their relationship. Her income provides stability, while she also maintains her own painting practice on the side, creating paintings that Trueson proudly promotes. He helps connect her with collectors and encourages her to keep producing works.
“I feel like I could say I want to do this crazy thing and he would support me no matter what,” Zia said. “I usually don’t because I’m a very careful person, but I know that I have someone to support me.”
Over time, that mutual support has replaced what once served as their shared foundation.
“That has definitely taken whatever we had, you know, that religion being our foundation,” Zia said. “It's now a shared support. One of our foundations.”
This October will mark 16 years since Trueson stepped foot in a town he’d never heard of, to meet a stranger he might marry. What began as an arrangement has long since become something chosen, in the quiet, steady work of building a life together.
