Kilopi,
I assume that you mean the bulges and depressions in the earth itself?

Take a sphere - a balloon, maybe. Attach handles to opposite sides - Glue? Use balloon like a chest expander, to develop your pectorals! As the opposite sides are pulled apart, the sides are drawn together. Try the same with a solid ball of dough - your hands will stick to the opposite sides - and the same thing happens. If an elastic body is made longer, its dimensions at right angles grow smaller - and this is true of the Earth too.

I'm beginning to clutch at straws to answer your point about the equal bulges, but I suspect it is to do with equal radial velocity. Although a point on the Earth's surface away from the Moon is travelling faster than a point on the 'near' side, it is also further away from the CoM. Expressed in degres or radians/second around the CoM, the velocity of each point will be the same, and their acceleration, change of direction, the same too. So the forces pulling up the Ocean will be the same.

John