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.
Well, that’s my age group. I wish I understood that before I got into my first long-term relationship in my early 20s, where I felt like I couldn’t get out because she goaded me into proposing and thus I had to follow through even though I really didn’t want to.