I feel like I have a cognitive dissonance that might be preventing me from being able to fully love.
This sounds like a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of the time when people are avidly looking for love but can't find it, it comes down to them not believing they deserve to be loved or actually deep down being happier to be single.
Forget what you think you know about yourself in relation to love, because it hasn't worked, and wipe that slate clean.
I see my friends getting married, and in some cases I saw them marrying people that were less than perfect; at least to me.
This is why you should never try to analyse other peoples' relationships, you answered your own question, they're not perfect to you because you would have never picked someone like them. These thoughts are not worth your mulling over.
This makes me feel like I have unrealistically high standards. Most people are not "perfect", they are just "okay".
Sometimes I want to ask those friends of mine that married women that I don't find all that attractive or smart or whatever whether they think their wives are perfect. Like, really perfect for them. Because I often feel like most people don't search for a perfect partner, they just find someone they like and stick with him/her.
You've said the word 'perfect' about 5 times in this post alone. You may be searching for perfection with love as the disguise, which will be very difficult as love itself is hard enough to come by.
Having said this, the 2 often will not come hand-in-hand, but if you find true love you will see the person in a light that makes them perfect for you, and they will see you in the same light.
But what if they said they do think their partner is perfect?
Bang.... Smoking gun
Well, then I'm fucked.
Only if you believe you are. There's more to life than the pursuit of love, despite what a lot of people may think..
See a lot of people look for love when they're young, wanting to spend the rest of their lives with someone so they can build a life together. However, when they're young, they still think young and they don't realise they need life experiences to evolve, to challenge themself and to have gone through a certain number of things before they find a settled life, or a life that suits them (some people choose to never settle down).
These are the experiences you are going through now. I think, as a previous poster stated, you need time to be single for a while and think about what you really want. Because as good as relationships are as a learning curve, if you keep making the same mistakes over and over you will stop learning and start repeating.
I could be spending months just searching for someone nice who likes me;
I would focus on finding someone who YOU really like, not the other way around. Because it seemed like the last girl liked you A LOT, had a lot going for her, yet you didn't like her as much and were slightly complacent in the relationship's evolution. Once you have to court someone because of genuine interest, the tables will turn or at least the dynamic will keep you interested.
Finding someone who's "perfect" by my unconsciously high standards seems like almost impossible. There are so many things that need to work there for it be perfect.
Perfect perfect perfect.. There's that word again.
So what if it's nearly impossible? You may actually be very lucky like some of us where the struggle is all about finding the one, but in the end when you've found that person, things actually go smoothly and it's better than some hollyweird romance flick. It does exist but takes a hell of a lot of belief and perseverance. You need to have your mind right, you've just come out of a relationship, give yourself time dude. Rome wasn't built in a day.
And being with someone who's less than perfect for you? Well, that's just a life of lying to yourself and to your partner; I think it COULD work, seeing how it works in my less than perfectly loving family. As long as you're willing to live with the thought that your partner loves you, although you are less than perfect for him/her.
You need to understand that you seek perfection, but what you seek is not necessarily what everyone else seeks. Things work differently for different people, they may not even know what they seek, but innately they seek it. You can learn a lot by observing people.