Alex Humphreys’s route to finding a husband is a direct one. Already disillusioned by her dating experiences at the age of 23, she has conceived The Husband Project – a conceptual artwork that will form part of her degree at Leeds College of Art and Design. Advertising on her blog and Facebook, she aims to meet and marry a man in the next three months and will include the marriage certificate in her final presentation.

“I don’t want to wake up when I’m 30 and think: oh my God, I’m on my own,” she says. She feels honesty is the best policy. “It’s better to say I’m looking for a relationship, not just a shag.”

She has received more than 150 responses to her posting, which set out her simple requirements: “1 Male; 2 As tall or taller than me; 3 Sense of humour”. A shortlist of 10 has emerged and I tag along on her first date – with Adam Mussett, a 27-year-old student of events management at Greenwich University, whom she has arranged to meet in a Soho pub.

To my surprise, Mussett seems perfectly normal: articulate and good-looking in checked shirt and jeans. What on earth is he doing here? “My sister e-mailed me a link to her posting, saying, ‘Here’s a girl that might actually marry you’,” he shrugs. “My first impression was: awesome. Why not get married? My grandparents only knew each other for six months before they got married, and a much higher percentage of arranged marriages stay the course.” The conversation never flags.

“He’s nice,” she says afterwards. She’ll see him again – but she won’t call off the others. “I’ll try some speed dating,” she says, and she may even fly out to Chicago to check out another applicant.

Poor Mussett: the next day I call him and he seems quite interested. “It went really, really well,” he says. “I’ve already made plans to go up to Leeds. Even if she won’t marry me it’s an amazing way to make a friend.” Anyway, “if you go to a shop you don’t buy the first thing you see”, he adds quickly.

The artistic merits of The Husband Project are dubious, but it does signify something bigger. With the number of single-person households projected to rise by 163,000 a year over the next 20 years, little wonder that people are resorting to ever more inventive ways to find relationships.

Humphreys’s project struck a note with Lucy-Anne Holmes, 32, an actress. She became so frustrated by the dating scene that she ended up writing a blog, spinstersquest.com, which she has now turned into a novel, 50 Ways to Find a Lover. “I tried everything,” she says. “Going alone, all dolled up, to a big-screen football match. I went lindy-hop dancing, pulling on a hen night, cruising the Eurostar. I even went to a vintage car rally.”

As it happens, quick, cut-and-dried methods like Humphreys’s might just be the answer. Penny Mansfield, of thecoupleconnection.net, believes that couples who act decisively are likely to stay together.

“When you look at people who have successful marriages,” she says, “they might have decided that ‘this is it’ within about two months. In terms of attraction, it takes quite a short time to work out whether something is potentially a goer.

“Essentially, what we know from research is that there isn’t a perfect Mr Right – but it is good to filter out Mr Wrong. And the question here is: can you short-cut it?”

Whether or not Humphreys’s art project helps her up the aisle, it probably won’t get her into the Royal Academy.

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