I found out the problem, it was so silly of me to overlook cURL's website documentation. All I had to do was pass in the environment variable for the run time linker to use the shared libraries before configure.
env LDFLAGS=-R/usr/local/ssl/lib ./configure --with-ssl --with-zlib
..and it worked without any issues. I now have https support in even Ubuntu 32bit. Here's the documentation link http://curl.haxx.se/docs/install.html