As Robyn Ochs looks ahead to her one-year wedding anniversary tomorrow, she says her marriage to Peg Preble has left her day-to-day life largely unchanged.

“I got married, went home, and fed the cats,” says Ochs, who works in Harvard’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

But last May 17, Ochs and Preble found themselves at the center of history in the making in Cambridge, joining hundreds of couples at City Hall to apply for marriage licenses on the first day that same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts.

Cambridge will mark the one-year anniversary tomorrow with a celebration at City Hall from 4 to 6 p.m., featuring a cake, speeches, and video footage from last year’s midnight celebration.

City councillors voted unanimously in November 2003 to begin issuing the licenses at the earliest possible moment when a state court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage took effect.

Over the past year, more than 6,000 same-sex couples have wed in Massachusetts, with more than 500 in Cambridge alone, according to state records. The average age of those same-sex couples was much higher than that of heterosexual marriages during the same period.

“It was the summer of middle-aged marriages,” jokes Lowell House Co-Master Diana L. Eck.

Eck and her spouse Dorothy A. Austin attended five same-sex weddings over the past year, and Austin, who is an ordained Episcopal minister, officiated at two. Ochs and Preble attended 12 same-sex weddings last year.

After filing for a license in Cambridge on May 17, Ochs and Preble, who have been together for eight years, obtained a waiver of the three-day waiting period and became the first same-sex couple married in Brookline.

Austin and Eck, who have been together for 29 years, were married last July 4 in front of hundreds of friends in Memorial Church, where Austin is an associate minister.

“By that time, we were on our fourth mortgage,” Eck says.

LOOKING AHEAD

But even as Cambridge prepares to celebrate the anniversary, the future of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts and across the nation is far from clear, say both supporters and opponents.

Same-sex marriage has come and gone in California, Oregon, and New York, with thousands of licenses issued before being voided by state judges. And voters in 11 states approved measures to ban same-sex marriage last November.

A nationwide poll published yesterday by the Boston Globe found that 50 percent of respondents were against recognizing Massachusetts same-sex marriages in other states, while 46 percent supported it.