Belongs to relationship nulls out belongs to id on save

In case anyone else thinks of monkey patching this to work BEWARE it causes the loading of the belongs to record to get mucked up Recursive Sideloading

I really do wish I knew the correct way to accomplish this task. My current solution is to create a new record with just the ID on it and store that but it seems pretty wrong, not to mention it will probably break something else later.