  We develop a description of tidal effects in astrophysical systems using
effective field theory techniques. While our approach is equally capable of
describing objects in the Newtonian regime (e.g. moons, rocky planets, main
sequence stars, etc.) as well as relativistic objects (e.g. neutron stars and
black holes), in this paper we focus special attention on the Newtonian regime.
In this limit, we recover the dynamical equations for the "weak friction model"
with additional corrections due to tidal and rotational deformations.
