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.
The relationship shouldn’t take much work at all. There are things tangential to the relationship that do take work, like finances and health issues, and all that other stuff, but if it takes a lot of work to just keep a relationship going then it probably needs to end.