That "Tidal Lock" Theory

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@Chessic_Sense

I thought it was more of a dragging force…one body dragged backward, one dragged forward.

Yep, that is the common misunderstanding that I referenced before that has been with us for well over 100 years.

Most likely it is caused by elementary textbooks copying other elementary text books without validating the assumptions.

Here is another page that will go into it in more depth in addition to the ones above.

https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/tides.htm

This misleading “explanation” is often found in lower-level physics texts that try to use “colloquial” language to describe things too complex for such imprecise language. Some of these books even say, as if it were a definition: “A force is a push or a pull”. To the student mind this implies motion. These textbooks do consider forces acting on non-moving objects, but the harm has already been done by the earlier statement that the student memorizes for exams.

But it is the tractive force, or the forces tangential to the surface that cause this effect.

Here is another video that tries to explain the way this works without resorting to those common but flawed analogies.

What Physics Teachers Get Wrong About Tides! | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios

And yes even NOAA uses this incorrect simplification,

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The reserves the more important force to another page.

NOAA Tides & Currents

This second component, know as the tractive (“drawing”) component of force is the actual mechanism for producing the tides.

It has been a problem for a long time.