George Lopez has given up dating to focus on his daughter Mayan
With a career spanning over four decades and counting, George Lopez has had no shortage of work to choose from. But during a recent interview for the Jennifer Hudson Show, Lopez, who just celebrated his 63rd birthday, revealed that his life will no longer continue dating, all in the name of focusing on his family life.
Kicking off his career in ’83, Lopez gained fame primarily through his stand-up comedy career, which discussed topics such as typical family issues, race, and ethnicity, often drawing from his own experiences as a Mexica-American citizen. He was married to Ann Serrano from 1993 to 2011 and together they had one child, Mayan, and it is Mayan that Lopez wants to focus on after the two bridged a gap that had long separated them.
“I decided not to date anymore,” shared Lopez on Monday’s episode of Jennifer Hudson Show. “You know, I’m 62, I’ll be 63 soon so I’m out of that.” But there was a bigger, more personal and pressing reason for his decision at play.
“That relieves a lot of the issues that I had,” he went on. “I realize that the only person I need to be in love with and have her love me back, is my daughter, Mayan Lopez. So all my attention will go to her.”
Following his ’93 marriage to Serrano, Lopez and his wife welcomed their only child together, Mayan, born in 1996. Although Serrano would eventually file for divorce in 2010 citing irreconcilable differences, when Lopez’s kidneys began to deteriorate in 2004, Ann donated one of hers to him.
After Lopez and Serrano split, Mayan ended up estranged from the comedian. This continued until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when the two could reconnect and reconcile. Lopez places the blame on himself concerning the emotional distance between them, saying he fell short as a father and a man.
“To be a father is a very special thing,” he said. “To be estranged from you child is the worst thing ever and for the first time in my life, I owned up to my mistakes and I’m lucky Mayan took me back into her life and a little bit of the show is about that.”
Now, the father-daughter duo also work together on the small screen. Starting in 2022, NBC started airing Lopez vs Lopez, a series starring Lopez and Mayan as fictionalized versions of themselves. In May 2023, it was renewed for a second season, which premiered the following April. The series, Lopez revealed, is in part inspired by Mayan’s TikToks making fun of him for not always being present in her life, and the emotional baggage they’ve had to unpack as a result. Some videos outright added fuel to the fire of Lopez seeking to reconnect.
“She went on TikTok to respond to a video that someone made attacking me. It was a video of her twerking upside down,” he recalled in 2022 on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “I realized I wasn’t the best dad, but when your kid’s twerking upside down, you’ve got some real f—ing problems. I didn’t realize it was this serious.”
“You have to be responsible for the trauma that you’ve caused,” he added. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m responsible for this, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life repairing it.'”
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