Going off the Reservation with Constructor Logic

I'm noticing a strange thing happening as I make classes more composable and immutable. Especially as I allow object lifetime to carry more meaning, in the form of context or transaction objects. This shift has made object initialization involve a lot of "real" computation, querying, etc. Combined with a desire to avoid explicit factories where possible, to capitalize on the power of my IoC container, this has led to an accumulation of logic in and around constructors.

I'm not sure how I feel about so much logic in constructors. I remember being told, I can't remember when or where, that constructors should not contain complex logic. And while I wouldn't call this complex, it certainly is crucial, core logic, such as querying the database or spinning up threads. It feels like maybe the wrong place for the work to happen, but I can't put my finger on why.

It's important to me to be deliberate, and I do have a definite reason for heading down this path. So I don't want to turn away from it without a definite reason. Plus, pulling the logic out into a factory almost certainly means writing a lot more code, as it steps in between my constructors and the IoC container, requiring manual pass-through of dependencies.

I'm not certain what the alternative is. I like the idea of object lifetimes being meaningful and bestowing context to the things below them in the object graph. Especially if it can be done via child containers and lifetime scoping as supported by the IoC container. But it is really causing me some headaches right now.

My guess at this point is that I am doing too much "asking" in my constructors, and not enough telling. I've done this because to do the telling in a factory would mean I need to explicitly provide some of the constructor parameters. But I don't want to lose the IoC's help for providing the remainder. So I think I need to start figuring out what my IoC can really do as far as currying the constructor parameters not involved in the logic, so that I can have the best of both worlds.

Maybe it will bite me in the end and I'll pull back to a more traditional, less composable strategy. Maybe the headaches are a necessary consequence of my strategy. But I think it's worth trying. At least if I fail I will know exactly why not to do this, and I can move on to wholeheartedly looking for alternatives.

Thoughts, suggestions, criticisms? Condemnations?