I SOLVED THE PROBLEM!!!!!
So the issue was the computer that my partner was playing on used to have my steam account logged into it. Steam seemed to be confused on who was playing and some of my older saves were on the other computer. so what I did was go through the Larian launcher and open the player profile folder and deleted it. then I turned off the cloud saving and after that it worked. we started a new game and none of the previous issues have yet to occur. Ill keep checking back here for the next couple of days to answer any questions if I can.
I had also previously signed in on my friend's computer to play via steam and was wondering if that might be related. We tried deleting some files, but maybe we weren't exhaustive enough.
