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It's not that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else at all, in even the littlest bit. It's that you have to love yourself-- that is, accept yourself unconditionally for who you are, value that person, and deem yourself a person both good and worthy of love and respect as you are-- before you can be able to successfully and happily love someone else completely and unconditionally. If you don't love yourself, and you attempt to love someone else unconditionally, there will be nothing to create balance: the person you love might turn out to be unhealthy for you, and you would be driven by your love to remain with them; whereas if you love yourself unconditionally also, you will be able to balance your love of the other person with your love for yourself, and your own need to retain health and self-integrity (in other words, one can love someone unconditionally and yet realize that it is not helpful to remain in a relationship with them, but this is very difficult to accomplish if one does not truly love oneself).
Also, if you don't love yourself truly and unconditionally, then in essence you will never be able to trust the love of the other person, because to your mind, their love is tainted by being directed to a person unworthy of it (i.e., you).
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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