Hear me out:
The only, absolutely only reason why people don’t generally marry on the first date is to figure out whether they DON’T fit together.
So if you manage to figure out that the relationship is not going to work out before you get into real commitments (kids, mortgage, …) you successfully avoided trouble.
I see it so often that people think that dating is already a strong commitment and that ending a dead-end relationship is a failure.
There is no shame in realizing the relationship is going nowhere and ending it.
If you figured out that it’s not meant to be at a point where ending the relationship is easy/cheap, that’s successful. A failure would be pushing it through at the easy/cheap part and having it blow up when you have kids and a mortgage.
A friend of mine was in a relationship that his girlfriend ended after 7 years. Turns out, she decided that it wasn’t going to happen after the first year and kept stringing him along for … reasons? Mostly because she feared that she’d be seen as a failure if she ended it at an earlier time.