Survey by survey comparisons of marriage rates in nationally representative cross-sectional datasets suggest that marriages are declining in South Africa. For African South African women of working age (between 15 and 59 years) marriage rates declined from 38.7 percent in 1995 to 31.4 percent in 2004. This change in marriage patterns motivated the current research and we asked whether the drop in marriage rates indicates a real generational shift in marital behaviour, or if this can be explained by changes in sampling frames in the independent surveys. The broad objective of the study is to investigate declining marriages in post-apartheid South Africa. The specific objectives are threefold. First, we construct a synthetic panel dataset from the 1995 to 1999 annual October Household Surveys and from the 2000 to 2006 September wave of the biannual Labour Force Surveys. Using the pseudo panel, we make use of the Age-Period-Cohort Model to disentangle marriage trends into age, period, and cohort effects in order to establish whether the change in marital patterns observed in post-apartheid South Africa reflects a real decline in marriages.