Dear lord, how do I make relative links work?

Sorry, for the melodramatic title, but this is driving crazy. Please forgive me.

I’m a Senior Digital Designer, with a lot of front-end XP and I’ve even worked with Jekyll several times in the past. Today, I’m working on a Middleman site because one of my co-workers (an actual developer) has his heart set on using Slate for an API site we are making, but doesn’t have the time to build it. Slate uses Middleman, Middleman uses Ruby. I’m a PC guy, I am already having a ton of issues with this project. I’m one gin and tonic away from partitioning my drive and installing Ubuntu.

That said, how do I get relative links to work? They work perfectly fine when I serve the site, but as soon as I build it, everything breaks.

I’ve tried adding the following (one at a time and in combination) into my config.rb file:
activate :relative_assets
set :relative_links, true
activate :dynamic_indexes

I’ve also tried the following in _navbar.erb:
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘index.html’, :relative => true %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘index.html’, :relative => false %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘/index.html’, :relative => true %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘./index.html’, :relative => true %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘//index.html’, :relative => true %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘/’, :relative => true %>
<%= link_to ‘index’, ‘index.html.erb’, :relative => true %>

Does anyone know of an extension that will allow me to write it naturally like this:
< a href="<%= Root %>/index.html">
or more Middleman specific:
< a href="<%= Source %>/index.html">

Thank you for your time, I’m totally sorry if I’m just a noob, and this is a dumb question. I’ve been googling for hours though, and this is my last resort before telling my project manger that we are going to need to go in another direction.

~G

Almost forgot, I tried this too:
set :strip_index_file, false