A person losing likability?

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During a persons lifetime why might someone go from being likeable to unlikable? What factors can change a person through there lifetime for people to view to them as having few likeable qualities?

In my experience, likeability is dominated by the "halo effect" (or its opposite, the "horns effect"), a logical fallacy very commonly held by all manner of people.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

The short version is, when a person perceives another person to have some positive traits which are personally important to them, they interpret that person's other traits as positive and/or assume the person will have positive traits despite no evidence of them.

Or, in the opposite direction, when key negative traits are perceived, they interpret the person's other traits as negative, and assume negative traits not in evidence (not perceived).

It's a sort of emotional avalanche effect. If you have ten traits, and someone perceives three of them as negative, it throws a switch in their minds and they perceive your other seven traits as negative.

Unfortunately, which traits are held as prominent, and whether they are interpreted as positive or negative is very much dependent on the person perceiving them, and is also dependent on context.

If you can find out which of your traits people are keying on first, you might find a pattern, where many people are keying on the same trait. You might then change or mask that trait, which could change the direction of the emotional avalanche, from negative to positive.

It is important that you keep in mind that it's not that your traits are inherently good or bad. It is how people are perceiving them, which has more to do with their psychology than it does with your innate goodness or badness.

Good luck! I have been trying to cope with others' cognitive biases as well, and it's not easy. Expect setbacks, but don't give up

Growing up is one reason. It's often considered cute when a small child (under the age of 10 or so) corrects adults when they get a fact wrong, but if an adult does it to another adult, it's often seen as getting too stuck on details, grammar nazi, yadda yadda yadda... in short, some behaviour is more acceptable from children than adults. Messing up with social rules is also allowed for children more since they aren't expected to have learned them the way adults are. So, if you make specific social mistakes as a child, the reaction might be mild annoyance, but others forgive you because you're "just a kid." But once you make them as an adult, you've lost that excuse.

Another is that people's preferences change. Person A might like person B because B is cheerful and outgoing, but ten years later something might have happened in A's life that has changed their preferences and they no longer like cheerful and outgoing people, thus they don't like B, either.

Then there is that someone might be friends with a mildly annoying person, thinking that they can handle the annoying traits, yet later after spending time with that person realizing that no, those traits are too much after all, so they don't want to deal with the person anymore.

And of course, the person who's no longer liked might've changed themselves in to something less likeable without realizing it.

Being truthful in all things limits a person's likability.  It seems that relationships are build upon foundations of pleasant little lies, and that those foundations can be shattered by one unpleasant truth.

For some people, their whole identity is based on ignorance and denial.  Confront them with how the world really is, and they are likely to respond defensively as if you had personally attacked them and not their false assumptions.

People with lose likeability if...
1. You do things that turn them off say, you badmouth other people or if you constantly come across as rude
2. You turn out to fall off a pedestal or don't live up to their expectations
3. They are in a new chapter in their lives and have been drifting apart for a while
4. The other person is controlling and you don't live up to their ideals
5. They have already been jealous of you and something happens in your life that turns them off
6. They think you are someone they can use but learn that you aren't a doormat
7. They have used you and got their fill and took off

Different precious lil "people" find different things likeable

There could be a lot of reasons why someone goes from likeable to unlikeable

Mental illness, disease, trauma

Likeability is always getting higher, the same or lower

When you become a bitter, miserable, toxic prick you're likely to be rated less likable, but it's not getting any better.